Blogger Custom Domains and PageRank
Buzz it
One of my secret concerns with switching over to Custom Domains was if my new blog address would keep its pagerank. So far my worries have come to fruition and my Google pagerank hasn’t yet caught up with me. Nor has Technorati bothered to respond to my emails asking them to transfer my links.
I’m not surprised with Technorati’s silence because it is notorious for it’s poor support. But what is Google’s excuse? After all, they still own Blogger don’t they. Surely they have a contingency plan and Googlebot should follow the links. That would make sense… right?
Some readers of InstaBLOKE have notified me with having similar frustrations. So if you have also noticed this problem, or if you know of a workaround then please share your experiences here.
Filed under: Blog SEO, Search Engine
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That is also my biggest fear with the custom domains. I have good search engine juice for my niche, and I worry about upsetting the cart.
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I have same worries, but couldn’t find a solution.
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At the same time perhaps we shouldn’t dwell on it either. I remember a video (I posted about it somewhere) where a Google rep said everyone obsesses too much over pagerank.
What’s important is the old links are being forwarded to the new URL and I can only hope that the pagerank will eventually catch up.
Getting Technorati’s cooperation however is another issue.
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Also, you have to remember that PageRank you are shown by Google is only the public PageRank, which is only released/updated every 3 or 4 months.
So switching to a new custom domain will drop your public pagerank to 0. At the very least until the next public update.
What matters is the internal pagerank at google, which is updated and tweaked constantly.
So the question is, after making the switch to a custom domain did your hits from google searches drop off sharply for any length of time?
If not, then your pagerank is being properly transferred over internally at google, and eventually your public pagerank will catch up during some of the next updates.(Note, from what I’ve seen, this should be the case)
As far as technorati, well they’re useless. I don’t even consider them anymore.
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Yes, this is the one reason I’ve stuck with my domain for now, because my Technorati ranking is rising and good for stuff like PayPerPost that I use…
Thanks for being so honest in this post.
I pray Technorati fixes this issue soon.
Paula
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To answer Dave, yes my traffic data is better than ever so I suppose that’s the bottom line. And I wholeheartedly agree that Technorati is useless. I suppose Sifry is just too busy fraternising with his money grubbing cronies @ the ‘Elite Retreat’ in San Francisco.
And Paula, that’s something you can always count on from the Bloke. I will always give you the straight goods, no matter what.
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Keep pestering Technorati. It took them a month but now they index 2kbloggers.com (as you know at first they refused to).
Google can take a long time. When I switched from LiveJournal to my own domain it took them 2 months to index my site.
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Believe it or not, being a pest is something that I’m very good at
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Awesome article, I’m still debating whether to switch over because of pagerank
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For what it’s worth, I recently made the changeover from a blogspot domain to a custom domain. I timed it a bit wonky it turns out, as just after I activated the custom domain, my blogspot address became a pagerank 1 site (it was only a couple of months old). My custom domain did, and still does, have a pagerank of 0. Most annoyingly though, now, some 3 weeks after setting up the custom domain and finally being receiving a 1 for my Google pagerank, both of my pages are now ranked as 0. Hey ho, my traffic is still most definitely up and continuing to grow, so I guess it’s true what Google say - it doesn’t seem to affect the pagerank.
I plan on running the blogspot and custom domain in tandem until the custom domain catches up with the blogspot page in relevancy, then I’m moving to Wordpress and self-hosting I think.
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@Merago, don’t forget Blogspot is really getting your pagerank and not you, so a custom domain still makes sense. Google is also nixing pagerank so the issue will soon be moot. Watch out for being penalized for double content and when you make the move to Wordpress this is the article you will need:
http://www.blogbloke.com/migrating-redirecting-blogger-wordpress-htaccess-apache-best-method/
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BLOGBloke (@blogbloketips) reply on November 19th, 2009 5:14 pm:
@Merago, don't forget Blogspot is really getting your pagerank and not you, so a custom domain still makes sense. G… http://bit.ly/4aXDi