In a project that didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would, I’ve just moved my personal site from its former home of www.michaelhanscom.com to its new home here at michaelhans.com.
The reason for the move is simple: The “…com.com” repetition at the end of the old URL formed by the end of my last name and the .com top-level domain suffix has always bugged me a little bit, and so the new URL is simpler and more clever.
It has been pointed out to me that this new setup is likely somewhat less optimal in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as “the SEO power of [thing].com is probably less than that of [first-part-of-thing].[second-part-of-thing]”. However, 1) I’ve had my time at the top of the search results, and I’m okay with continuing to drop down in the rankings a bit, and 2) I’ve stopped running ads or paying any real attention to my statistics/site visits/rankings, so SEO just isn’t at the top of my concerns right now. I’m not going to ignore that entirely, but it’s simply not a major concern.
At this point, the move should be complete: All content has been transferred over to the new domain (and I’d like to take a moment to plug the WordPress plugin Duplicator, which made moving my blog much easier than I thought it would be; it wrapped everything up in an archive, I moved the archive to the new location, ran the installer, and that was it–it even scanned the database to replace any links to www.michaelhanscom.com inside blog posts with links to michaelhans.com, which was one of the tasks I was dreading), the .htaccess redirects are in place and working properly, and I’ve adjusted all external connections so that they all point to the right place.
All in all, a rather surprisingly uneventful move.