I’ve had fun and a fair amount of success in tracking down the answers to my questions about how a total overhaul of my site will affect my search engine rankings. In some cases, the answers are straightforward; in other cases, an answer has lead to another question. Here’s what I have so far:

Q: I’ve been wanting to transfer my site to a different hosting company but I haven’t known how (or if) that will affect my site’s search engine ratings.

A: The answer to this seems to be “No”. That answer told me an important piece of information I hadn’t had, namely that search engines search by domain name, not IP address.

Q: When I first created the site, the domain name I chose was bend-in-the-river.com. I published the site with that domain and then a bit later, decided to also use susanlitton.com. Since the site was already up, I ended up putting susanlitton.com as an alias. I’d like to switch that out — have susanlitton.com as the main domain name and bend-in-the-river as the alias. Will that change affect my ratings?

A: A tentative answer to this seems to be “Yes” with the added bit of info that an older domain will fare better than a newer domain. However, there seemed to be some disagreement and/or lack of clarity about how an alias actually works. I solved this dilemma by writing to my hosting company. Here’s their response:

The alias works via redirection from the zone records.
Zone records are basically a table that resolves domain names to i.p. addresses.
Thus, susanlitton.com has a zone record that tells servers looking for susanlitton.com to go to bend-in-the-river.com. The advantage of having an alias is that all e-mails going to susanlitton.com get forwarded to bend-in-the-river.com.

To show it visually…

bend-in-the-river.com has 66.113.130.214 as it’s i.p. address.

susanlitton.com also has 66.113.130.214 as it’s i.p. address.

I don’t know if all hosting companies do an alias this way, but I was happy to at least see how one company handles it. A solution to this concern seems to be to use a 301 redirect. More about this in another post.

Q: I also thought that at some point, I’d like to convert the site from HTML to PHP, but again, I haven’t known if that would mess things up.

A: Again, this question got a bit of a mixed review. However, people seem to agree that to a search engine, index.php is seen as the same as index.html. If you have any doubts, though, it seems that adding the trailing slash at the end of the URL will clear it up as well as possibly speed up your site a bit. (See waferbaby’s Slash Forward (Some URLs are Better Than Others))

Q: If I decide to include the site in my portfolio, it’s going to need major overhaul. In fact, although the content and the overall site architecture are still OK and I’d keep most of the images, I’d probably have to do pretty much everything else from scratch. How will that affect the ratings?

A: Short answer is that there will be a dip. Again, a 301 redirect will help here and I’ll explore that in my second post tonight.

Q: I’d like to use some of the tips and tools we’ve been studying in class to find out all I can about what is and what isn’t working to help people find my site.

A: The only thing I’ve done on this so far is sign up for Mint. I think it will be way cool to log some of these early stats and compare them throughout the process of my redesign. But see . . . even this brings up a question for me. I signed up for Mint using the main domain (www.bend-in-the-river.com). Since I now know that my alias has the same IP address, will Mint automatically give me stats for both or do I need to buy a separate package for www.susanlitton.com? I haven’t had a chance to look at Mint yet or figure out how to use it so hopefully when I crack it open, that answer will be obvious.