General

A Request to Webmasters – Change Links to PermacultureNews.org

You haven’t been seeing so many posts of late, as I’ve been a little distracted, getting under the hood of this website to fix a few things.

Given the very international scope of our work, one of items I’ve checked off the things-to-do list is to switch our domain from permaculture.org.au over to www.permaculturenews.org.

Important: To help search engines recognise and index us properly, I’d be immensely grateful if the webmasters who are linking to us would be so kind as to edit those links, changing the web address to our new one: www.permaculturenews.org

When you do so, please remove mention of ‘Australia’ — i.e. change ‘Permaculture Research Institute of Australia’ to ‘The Permaculture Research Institute’.

And if you’re not linking to our site, why not do so? The more people can find us, the more we can network and support each other, the more knowledge and resources we can share, and the more projects we can see getting established!

Thanks to you all for all you’re doing in the world.

9 Comments

  1. You don’t need to ask Webmasters to change their links. Place a 301 redirect in your htaccess file to redirect all the old urls to new ones. You won’t lose any of your backlink profile.

  2. Already done Hands. The reason for asking people to change their links is for SEO purposes, not for ensuring people end up in the right place, as that’s already taken care of. Thanks though.

  3. The 301 redirect is for search engine spiders as well as human beings i.e it’s for SEO purposes. If your 301 redirects are already in place then there is no need to make a request for changes from third party websites. That’s what 301 redirects are for.

  4. Sorry Hands. You’re not understanding me…

    There are incoming links to us, with the old address, with the word ‘Australia’ in the text links – making Google nudge us into regionality. But, again, thanks for your input.

  5. Actually Craig, Link Text has little affect on rankings these days. Three years ago perhaps, but not so much now as it is a low influence factor mixed in with some 100s of other factors. I wouldn’t worry myself, as Hands says, installing 301s will be just fine.

  6. “SEO’s” could debate this endlessly, but as one myself :), I’d say that you’re doing just the right thing Craig. Link text *is* still the most important ranking factor, and while 301 redirects will help some of your old link juice transfer to the new domain, webmasters updating their links will be much more helpful.

  7. >but as one myself
    Hehe, so are I.

    >“SEO’s” could debate this endlessly
    We could, but I’m not going to. I stand by my statement.

    Woz

  8. One thing I can’t understand is the problem you state about regionality. I can’t see any regionality bias whether it’s in the ranking or anchor text being displayed as your Page Title in the SERPs.

    This isn’t a debate over a grey area. The point I was making was that this post was completely unnecessary as 301 redirects would suffice and it’s not a good idea to make a public plea to ask third parties to help you manipulate search engine results for your own website. It’s like asking Google to slap you as hard as it can.

  9. My understanding is that the Google’s method for ranking is proprietary. I am not an employee of Google and therefore am not in a position to know for certain what the weightings are.

    That said, we believe that changing both the URLs and link text will have a positive effect of greater than zero, and would therefore be helpful to permaculturenews.org

    Craig, seems to us that your request is technically correct.

    Thanks.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Articles

Back to top button