Owning Your Domain Name

Kim Wolterman at Blogging for Authors

Over the weekend I presented information on blogging for authors to St. Louis Publishers Association members. I have written a post about it over at my Write Formation blog. Unfortunately you can't read it right now. I will get to the problem in a minute. As I was doing research in preparation for my presentation I learned about some things that need to be adjusted on my own blogs. For example, on myhousehistory.net my home page is static, meaning it does not change. It was designed that way on purpose as I wanted it to look like a website as opposed to just a blog. My blog posts are entered on the "How To" tab of the website which is several pages down in the site. While the website looks good, having the new posts so deep in the website means that the web crawlers which search for new material and thus have them appear in a Google search are probably not finding my posts. This answers some questions I have always had about why they don't appear in the Google Alerts I have set up, and perhaps why readers are not finding my site. I am currently looking into how to rectify that while still keeping the look that I want.

But what I also learned is that having a blog on blogger.com and not owning my own domain name is also hurting my search engine optimization results. For example, this blog is kimwolterman.blogspot.com which sends my Google "juice" to blogspot (AKA Blogger) instead of me. The way around that is to purchase the domain name kimwolterman.com (which I actually already own, by the way - just haven't used it on this blog), and have the blogspot.com site redirect to my domain name. I have not attempted any changes to this blog yet, but Saturday night I purchased writeformation.com directly through Google (which owns Blogger). The reason I did this is because they said they would take care of all the behind the scenes changes which need to be made for the re-directing.

Sounds easy, right? No such luck. The new domain name results in an error code when you type in the URL. That would be bad enough except that beginning yesterday even the old blogspot.com URL for my writing blog results in the error code. So no one can see my blog at all now. They had said it could take up to three days for the transfer to take place, but that in the meantime your old URL would work. Wrong! And this is why I never tried to change anything before now. I am certainly not going to mess around with changing the domain here until I get the other blog straightened out.