Over the last few weeks we worked to obtain a new .com TLD for a .net domain/website that is doing very well and becoming popular and relevant to common searches. The new location, http://www.countyjailinmatesearch.com has been live for nearly one week at this writing and had begun showing indexed pages and hopefully SERPs of it's own soon.

On the subject of moving a website from one domain to another, here are a few of the steps we took, some of which are found using Google's help section inside webmaster tools.

Advice to myself: Next time, as soon as you think you're going to get the domain you want, create a cpanel acount SOMEWHERE and UPLOAD all the pages you have available IMMEDIATELY! Get those ages aging, When the time comes, THEORETICALLY, it should be a help.

1. Preparing for the initial upload concerned changing any and all instances of the domain name occurring spelled out entirely in HTML, then in visible text. Using a simple "find and replace" tool, we did the previous steps with case sensitive turned on, sometimes the site name is written in all caps and we wanted it to stay that way. Sounds redundant, it is, but it's accurate as well.

2. Once the site tested out, we ran several tests on it for dead links and orphan pages, mostly to clean up previous mistakes and another check for accuracy.

3. Create a new profile in webmaster tools, verify, then enter a request to move your site in Webmaster Tools interface, do any verification required and submit a new sitemap. The effects here are dubious at best. Doing this step properly SHOULD (another theoretical) cause the page rank for one site to be transferred to the corresponding pages accordingly. Haven't seen that in either attempt doing this.

4. Once we were sure that everything was covered for search engines and to prevent any redirects ending in loops or 404 errors, we created a permanent (301) WILDCARD redirect for the entire .net website to the www.com website. That type of redirect tells search engines your intention is to move from one place to another and the content is NOT coming back.

5. The last step, after testing all the pages from the site map to ensure they arrive at the new destination and how fast, is to get any backlinks to your old site changed to the new site.

Some of the best advice is probably obvious, but here it is anyhow. Make your move as close to 1:1 change as possible. If the site you're moving has good PR and will take a while to get re situated with your link partners, DON'T try to rebrand on the new domain, you might as well just start a whole new website instead, then swap them if you're successful. The move needs to be seamless is the point.

Back to bed coffee heads, that really was it. If something was overlooked, it will come out. Don't jump the gun trying to retune or SEO or site until ALL pages have been indexed and appear as SERPs using the command "site:". During the switch, the list of top words associated with your site can be off if the current combination of pages indexed are higher in keywords you aren't promoting.

Keep an eye on it and Keep it Str8!

After nearly 10 years of being Str82u.net, the website was moved overnight to it's permenant home; STR82U.COM (http://str82u.com). The .com extention has been reserved for this purpose twice; inexperience and poor management caused the (.com) domain to fall into the hands of "squatters" who eventually profitted $500 from that mistake. After a period of parking, and a few ideas for different concepts being entertained, the decision to upgrade TLDs was only natural and fair to a faithful website and companion.

Str82u.net has been successful in a niche marketing based on the keyphrase "free people search", none as much as county jails and inmate search, which actually started out as a dispute due to more unwise decisions. The site itself has been a test subject for beta trials and experiments in search engine optimization before being placed on "Dont Screw This Up" status early in 2007. Design and layout upgrades were also considered but put on hold pending the transition; opting to keep differences to a minimum now and risk mistakes later.

As a goal, the site's growth and development as a narrow subject directory is a possibility, reaching a larger audience to share a resource that equally benefits the user and designer/developer . Other web properties spawned by the original str82u.net site includes our personal seo tools used in search engine optimization and a directory in progress that we hope to have as much pride in as we do STR82U, now with dot com goodness.

Keep it Str8!
reprinted by permission

Cleaning code is good SEO. Can it be bad? After doing terrible things to good domains just to see how it happens, I'm sure there's an "SEO Dossier" with "reseller rights" that describes this in technical detail. For now all we're working with is experience and the money saved. There's a key word method we'll share toward the end that compliments any housekeeping.

When trying to improve your page rank and placement, you would expect the only adverse effects of cleaning code might be the newness of the page on the server. That's a basic philosophy for our aged html. There aren't going to be specific references on this page, if you work with source and haven't experienced something like this, think about it. Humanizing searchbots while you're reading this might lend perspective to our conclusions which influences our intuitive design over basic programming priciples.

Reformatting and cleaning html from a 111kb file dropped it to 12kb. (short blip, read at the bottom) It was the first time to get a Google top ten homepage on purpose. What are you going to do now? Start cleaning up source on ALL your sites so you can go to Disney! But WAIT! There's more. Same site and an enormous in-page JavaScript for making banners slide down a page. Making money on this until an email from AdSense made us rethink/recode and that made another improvement. Speed, right? (CTR oddly improved too).

NOW we really had a plan. Remove the slider code from another popular site, reformat the html and make money. LOL, really loud! Sadly, this time the result so negative it was HEART CRUSHING, disappearing from hundreds of Google SERPs within the month. DEAD! Yahoo resurrected it later where it's successful today, but how can removing a large portion of JAVASCRIPT of all things cause that?

THERE'S THE POINT: The AdSense code was originally in a div at the bottom of the source where it was the last thing the spider saw. When the ad script was written to an adjoining cell of the "main attraction", the content had changed. Not visibly, but to the search engine's ability to assume what people see. Not going to try an make a theory out of this, we did this. Do what ever it takes to get the visible content as close to the head as possible. If you have an expanding menu, WE BELIEVE it's interpreted as being a solid object your users have to scroll through to get to what they came for. If you have in-line styles, nested anything or out of place scripts directly after your bodytag, get rid of it or reposition it with CSS. In regards to nested tables, too many sites were done with in this fashion when padding is all that's neccessary.

Summery: Make sure search engines get meat and potatoes first when they hit your plate, serve the sweet stuff once they fill up. Want an example. countyjailinmatesearch.net. Most any page, search bar and top float from the bottom. View source and you'll see content right away.

Here's that tip for writing the hyperlink. If it's a good phrase, hit the return/enter key to begin the text against the left margin. Doesn't work when we coded any page like that exclusively. It's not human/software interaction natural. Other times we'll break the text of a link to place the keyPARTS on the margin.

Keep it Str8!

PS From the top: Str82u.net was originally on a big messy php CMS but looked good to me and at the time, it jaust HAD to go back to .html format. "View Source", it became a really huge file. Eventually it came down to taking out all the redundant references to the database, css and all. The total added by automation was about 100kb and averaged around 50kb for most pages. Days after, one phrase went from page 10 to 4 and another appeared from nowhere at #4 and believe it or not, another site followed the same term when it got reformatted. This made more money than my three sons working in a lumber yard. Thanks for sticking with me down here.