Your own domain

Do mom bloggers need their own domains? I might not be the most impartial person to ask, since I just made the switch from a blogspot-hosted blog to a self-hosted WordPress blog on my own domain.

However, after compiling the list of the most popular parent bloggers, I have to say that some of my opinions on the subject were challenged. As an Internet marketer, I would have told you all the live long day to get your own domain—but then nearly half of the most popular parent bloggers don’t have their own domain.

Guess what? ME.blogspot.com (or ME.typepad.com) is working just fine for them. Better than fine—great!

So I’m beginning to think that in the parent substratum of the blogopshere, it’s a lot less important to have your own domain than it would be in, say, the business world.

That being said, it’s not a bad idea—but if your blog is popular enough to make it onto the Popular Parent Bloggers list, it may not be the best idea to change.

Why not? Well, you may have a lot of Technorati clout (ie links) at your old domain (Technorati is a blog search engine, if you didn’t know. Oh, of course you knew, I meant him over there.). Michelle has taught us that Technorati links expire after six months, so you might be able to begin to outpace your old blog URL (and no, you can’t move it on Technorati) after six months, but do you want to e-mail every person that has you on their personal blogroll to get them to fix it? I wouldn’t and I’m only on a couple (thank you, ladies!)

Also important, you may have a lot of search engine clout (ie links) at your old domain as well. On the plus side, it’s possible to channel that clout to a new domain if you use something like Blogger’s Custom Domain kind of thing. You have to make sure that your URL structure doesn’t change (like mine did… gonna have to learn Apache to fix that. You can avoid this fate by consulting my guide, but I went and made things complicated on myself by changing my URL structure and now I definitely don’t want to go back).

One possible solution for someone with a lot of clout at their .blogspot or .typepad domain: if the appropriate URL is available, buy it (I’ve had good experiences with www.GoDaddy.com ) and redirect it to your .blogspot or .typepad blog instead of the other way around. (if given an option, use a 301 redirect). You can also select the option of “masking” the domain so that even though someone is redirected to ME.blogspot.com, their address bar still reads “www.ME.com.” (With GoDaddy, both of these functions are accessible under Domain Forwarding.)

Of course, Technorati doesn’t understand redirects at all, so it may see www.ME.com as a second blog with the same content as your first one (which it actually does to me… it’s really annoying). But you know what? Technorati isn’t the be-all and end-all of your blog.

Disclosure: the GoDaddy link is an affiliate link.