Today, I have a tale to tell you about changing domain names in the hopes that you can learn from my mistakes and avoid the knots I got on my forehead.

Once upon a time, I thought I wanted to be a Virtual Assistant. So I decided to create a website, and of course, the first thing I needed was a domain name. I had decided the name of my fledgling business would be Suzanne-Bird-Harris.com (don’t you just love the creativity? LOL), but at that time, that domain name was not available. I ended up settling for vAssistantSvcs.com. I set up an email account on that domain, but since I had one client who took up most all of my time, I procrastinated about setting up a website.

A few years went by, and I had several clients, but I wasn’t their VA, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. I had built their websites and I did Internet/website-related things for them once their sites were up. Word-of-mouth was the only means by which I gained new clients, and it got to be very embarrassing to be a web designer without a website to refer people to. So…I broke down and threw up a website on my domain.

Over time, I got more and more frustrated trying to relay my domain name over the phone (‘v’ sounds like ‘b’ and you can’t just say ‘services abbreviated’ because a surprising number of people don’t know that the abbreviation for services is ‘svcs’.) There’s the first lesson: Make sure others can easily understand your domain name when you say it, because they won’t always be clicking on a link to get to you. This is particularly important if your business is already enjoying great word-of-mouth growth! Make sure it’s easy to say and relay to others.

So, I went back to GoDaddy and checked to see if vAssistantServices.com was available yet. And it was! So I bought it with a quickness that would give you whiplash. Ha! Problem solved!

Uhh…not. By this time I had discovered WordPress and vAssistantSvcs.com was a blog with lots of posts and pages which our good buddy, Google, had indexed. All my content was on the hard-to-say domain name.

Around this time is when I learned about BlueHost, so I decided to move all of my websites (I had several by this time) over there. I setup vAssistantServices.com as the primary domain and moved all of my content to it. At last, I had all my content on the right domain name! My celebrating was short-lived, though, because our good buddy, Google, didn’t know about vAssistantServices.com – all of the indexing of my content had been done under the old domain name. All of those links I’d spread far and wide across the Internet were now invalid and gave a ‘Page Not Found’ error message. Gone was my Page Rank, my Alexa rank shot up into the millions again, and all my SEO work was trashed.

I started poking around in my hosting account and found something called ‘Addon Domains’ which would allow me to add the old domain name to this new hosting account, so that’s exactly what I did. I pointed vAssistantSvcs.com at the root directory of my account, and voila! Either domain worked and all my links worked again! I began using the new domain name, confident that the old domain still worked.

A few months later, I noticed that my two domain names had different Alexa ranks and different Page Ranks. Huh? What was going on? I really only had one set of content, shouldn’t both domain names have the same stats? Then it dawned on me – in using the Addon Domains feature and pointing the old domain name to the root directory of my content, I committed the Duplicate Content sin: I had two separate websites with exactly the same content.

Here’s the second lesson: What I should have done, instead, was a 301 Permanent Redirect, which is essentially like doing a change of address with the Post Office. Then, anyone clicking any link using the old domain would be automatically redirected to that same link at the new domain name, which was all I was after.

So, I had to undo the Addon Domain thing and go back to GoDaddy (where all my domain names live) and set up a 301 Redirect of vAssistantSvcs.com to vAssistantServices.com. Now, all is right in my world again.

Moral(s) of the Story:

1. Choose your domain name wisely. Make sure it’s easy to remember, easy to spell, easy to say and easy to understand when spoken over the phone.
2. Use a 301 Redirect on the old domain when you move your content to a new domain name. Don’t do what I did and inadvertently or unknowingly cause yourself Duplicate Content problems by using the Addon Domain feature of your hosting account.

P.S. This only works when all you’ve changed is the domain name. If you’ve moved your content into WordPress from an HTML site (which changes the URLs for your content), then there are other redirects you’ll need to do to preserve the links already indexed by Google and used by others. But that’s a story for another day…

P.P.S. Suzanne-Bird-Harris.com is still not a particularly great name for my business from a branding perspective. I still get a lot of inquiries from people wanting me to do traditional VA work for them. But I keep it for 3 reasons:

1. I could be considered a highly specialized VA, so the name isn’t just totally inapplicable.
2. I’ve had this name for a 7 years and counting, so most of the world knows me by this name, 100% appropriate, or not.
3. I haven’t thought of a better one. (If you do, please share. LOL)

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