Pawel Szulencki Search Engine Optimization/Marketing blog.
Delicious domain name change issue
19Aug2008 Filed under: SEO Author: Pawel Szulencki
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Delicious, a highly popular social bookmarking service changed the design and domain name from del.icio.us to delicious.com to avoid user misspelled errors.
We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com”, and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends - Delicious blog.
You can read the whole story about website redesign on Delicious blog. They also made a video explaining sites new feature available on Flickr.
But thats not what i wanted to write about.
The redesign and domain name change tool place on July 31st, 2008. Today is 19th of August 2008 and i made a simple search query for “Delicious“. And guess what, there are 2 results both from old and new domain names on Google.
(Click on image to enlarge).
I also checked if they used any redirect and of course they did use a 301 search engine friendly permanent redirect so thats not the problem.
So what is the problem? I guess it takes time for Google to follow the redirection and index the whole website at the new domain name.
Can it cause a duplicate content issues until they manage to index the website again? It shouldn’t. As long as there is permanent redirection used Google will not ban a website for a duplicate content issue.
It simply takes time for Google and other search engines to index the site again under new domain name. And because Delicious is a very big website containing hundred of thousands of pages it may take some time to index it all again.
After some weeks the duplicate result on Google should dissapear and you should see only one, delicious.com website.
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About this blog
Pawel Szulencki is a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Marketing certified specialist who is interested in organic SEO, paid campaigns (PPC) and Social Media Marketing channels. (Read more)
rob (4 comments.)
August 20th, 2008 at 12:38 am
I would have hate to made that change. I think if it were up to me, I would run both for a while, and then when making changes or updates only do it to the new domain. This would make the fans of old want to switch instead of being forced to switch. I guess there is the duplicate content issue though. Too bad they didn’t start with delicious.com
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Pawel Szulencki (18 comments.)
August 20th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Well, Rob i think that it would be better if they bought the delicious.com domain and redirect it to the old del.icio.us domain. All fans would be happy as there would be no domain change and all new members would find it even with such domain. They could also buy all misspelled domain names and 301 redirect it to the old domain. The outcome would be the same. Even if someone types delicious.com they would arrive to del.icio.us domain. Honestly i dont know why they didnt do it in the first place. Maybe they wanted that change to attract more visitors, get more inbound links etc.
yannis (2 comments.)
August 30th, 2008 at 12:07 am
I agree with you Pawel, they should have done that change a long time ago. Misspelling was a problem since the beginning.