All your links are broke to us

Have you noticed anything different about SEO Theory today?

We moved it to a new server and upgraded the Wordpress. Other than that, nothing’s changed — except that our admin subtly altered the URL structure (probably because I’ve been whining about it for over a year).

Now the SEO Theory blog thinks it’s located at http://www.seo-theory.com/wordpress/ instead of http://seo-theory.com/wordpress/. And you can well imagine (or should be able to imagine) what that has done to SEO Theory’s profile on the Web.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Eh. All he has to do is implement a 301-redirect. No big deal.”

Maybe. Maybe not.

301-redirects are certainly useful things, but in terms of Web relationships they rarely exist. So today we have broken all your links to us (unless you were linking the way I wanted to see you link). Problem is, now we’ve also broken all our own links to us.

Do you have any idea of how many links to us I embedded in previous SEO Theory posts?

Ill-considered changes can have far-reaching consequences. So can long-considered changes. For example, how many feedreaders just broke? How many scraper sites just broke? How many XML feed settings need to be changed?

URL nomenclature issues are not just limited to spiders. And deciding between absolute and relative URLs doesn’t resolve all linking problems.

In fact, the Web site you have known as SEO Theory no longer exists simply because it’s almost all database-driven — we have virtually re-engineered the entire site, except for our SEO white papers section.

The next time I log into Technorati I may not be happy with what I see. I dunno. Maybe we’ll have more authority than the old URL. Maybe we’ll have more happy news. I have no idea.

Time will tell what happens to this blog’s search visibility, although as long as it continues to ping the major services there should not be any problems.

And, oh yeah, we did set the canonical domain name in Webmaster Tools a long time ago to use the www. version of the name.

Of course, some people drop “www” from their domain names. Danny Sullivan did that with Search Engine Land, for example. Why ask people to type in four extra characters, you might ask. Well, maybe I just want to know that you love me enough to want to type in those four extra characters.

In fact, the whole “include the ‘www’ portion of your domain name” concept has undergone a slow and subtle transformation in value. Time was we had to be careful about specifying the proper protocol with the right sub-domain (ftp:// with ftp.* and http:// with http:// and https:// with https:// etc.) but now it’s almost all second nature. And our browsers can handle all the different protocols. You no longer need an FTP client just to download an FTP file if you know the URL.

We have blurred the distinctions that early generation technologies imposed upon us because we have refined our tools and become more sophisticated tool users.

Anyway, we’ve made a change and the change is made. So now things may work fine or maybe somewhere something trips up. You never know until you find out. It’s one of those, “Well, Fred, I think we have to brave the Tyranosaurus Rex if we want to go home to Wilma and Betty” moments. So, if you’re linking to an old SEO Theory post, don’t worry. The 301s seem to be working (hooray for our side!). If you’re not linking to an old SEO Theory post, shame on you! You should be!

Either way, let’s just see what happens….