Domain Mapping With WordPress – Kiss Your Traffic Goodbye (in the short term) July 31, 2007
Posted by showmescifi in b5, babylon 5, blog, blogging, doman, doman mapping, exile, google, technorati, traffic, wordpress.trackback
It’s been three weeks since we moved from showmescifi.wordpress.com to showmescifi.com – thanks to a WordPress domain mapping feature.
In principal it’s a great idea, a great service and is easily done. We had a small issue for a few hours when we didn’t realize that the existing mail server would no longer work – a friendly wordpress.com support person helped out and now email works (thanks to WordPress and Google Apps).
The only REAL problem for ShowMeSciFi is that since we’ve moved, traffic has been cut by nearly two thirds.
Why is that?
I’d speculate a number of things..i think we lost alot of our Google/Technorati juice for one.
Google and Technorati now treat us like a new site almost – with no history of authority and links.
It’s really quite unfortunate that such a great service can have such a negative affect on readership.
That said – we’re committed to building ShowMeSciFi and continuing to populate with the stuff that SciFi fans care about. Thanks for being part of the journey.
Show Me SciFi 
Over the last week, whenever I typed either showmescifi.com or showmescifi.wordpress.com into Firefox, I.E. or Konqueror i was being redirected to a domain registration site. The problem seems to have been fixed now, but maybe that was the reason for your sudden drop in traffic.
Since all of your old links should redirect to your new site, changing domains isn’t going to cause your traffic to immediately drop, it may have been something else.
AS IT turns out John Campbell Rees is correct – much to my dismay the site wasn’t showing up on certain isp’s.
in my home town i didn’t have a problem. I’m in Nevada this week and pop no site.
Problems was that in the domain mapping exercise i only changed 3 of the name servers. While the registars records still had five entries with the final two pointing to GoDaddy servers. So…for some reason even though the first three name servers were right the fact that the last two weren’t messed it up.
go figure.
I noticed the domain name change and commented on it in the latest entry you had at that time, but that comment seems to have been deleted, so I’ll reiterate here, congratulations on the domain name. *smile*
When I first try to connect using the old WordPress URL, my address bar gets redirected to several showmescifi addresses, finally ending up at the correct one.
I’ll redirect my blogroll link to this place using the domain name, that should sort out any possible problems.
You can use domain mapping for free @ Blogetery. http://blogetery.com/blog/free-domain-mapping-with-your-wordpress-blog-and-more/
Cool stuff!
Thank you for your website 🙂
I made on photoshop backgrounds for myspace and youtube and even more
my backgrounds:http://tinyurl.com/5fmh8q
Hope you had a good day and thank you again!
Thanks for the tip. I am considering going down this path and this was the main issue that concerned me, losing all the technorati and google juice. Thanks for the reassurance.