After an argument discussion with the “why the hell would you change your url structure when you don’t have to” whore late last night, I decided to completely flip the Sugarrae site to a new url structure. As anyone who knows me will tell you, once I make a decision, I do it. I managed to change the blog around faster than Lindsay Lohan was able to get her dealer on speed dial when she checked out of rehab.
With some help from Reese to implement some design changes I needed to go along with the change, the change has been completed. To address why I did it, as well as some of the changes that went along with it, I decided to do a post to explain my reasoning. I’ve been wanting to do the change for a while, but always put it off. Then I ran into something and figured it was time to simply get it over with.
When I originally came out with the magazine style format, I didn’t care about anticipate some of the problems that would come with it. The post title pretty much strikes what those issues were, but I’ll give full disclosure in case the “why those were issues” is not super obvious. ;-)
The split link popularity issues…
I always recommend people not use “enter here” pages because it serves to ultimately split your link popularity to the homepage. For example, when a site uses a “enter here” graphic on their / homepage and once you click, you go to /secondhome.html – some people are going to link to the enter here page of the site and some people will link to the /secondhome.html of your site instead. It serves to split your “home page” link popularity between the two pages instead of having the links condensed to have one strong homepage.
Additionally, “enter here” pages usually have little text and less phrases and indicators with which to rank. I never saw the / of the new version of Sugarrae as an “enter here” page, but users seemed to. My inbound links became split between / and /blog/ as people linked to both versions when linking to the site or mentioning my name. This caused the toolbar pagerank of the homepage to drop to a five while the toolbar pagerank of the /blog/ page soared to a six. Combining the power of the two was an obvious move to me.
The Technorati rank issues…
This one drove me absolutely nuts since the month after the /blog/ launch. My / was static and outside of wordpress. Well, technorati considered / and /blog/ as two seperate sites. So, not only was my link popularity split, but my “technorati rank” was as well. The / of the site had an authority in the upper one hundreds and a rank of about 30K. The /blog/ of the site had an authority in the upper two hundreds and a rank of about 14K.
I contacted Technorati about this numerous times. While they were able to do some sort of override so that doing a search on either url brought up both in the results, the ranks remained split. I was told the only way to “combine” the ranks was to have the blog in the root. I’m a very anal person and this simply drove me insane. After doing the switch last night, technorati updated by the time I woke up this morning, finally combining the two “site” values giving the overall site an authority score in the high three hundreds and a technorati rank of under 10K.
The full feed issues…
The main page of the magazine style Sugarrae site used a script to generate the homepage from the Sugarrae feed. When I finally decided to switch to full feeds using complete rss for the sake of the people emailing me every single week to complain that I was indeed not using full feeds, it messed up the homepage of the site and was displaying full posts instead of snippets there as well. So, I had to flip it back to normal and continue to receive the email complaints.
Now, sure, I could have used the static homepage option in wordpress that had come out in a version earlier – but because it hadn’t been set up that way to begin with, any change I made to the status quo would have required a url structure change. And sure, I could have hired someone to create a workaround, but I have too much to do to manage another thing.
And when less than five percent of my traffic comes from search engines ([sarcasm] surprising considering the awesome keyword targeted titles I use [/sarcasm]), the engines can kiss my ass. I’m doing the option easiest for me. And that was moving the blog into the root and creating a monster htaccess to facilitate the change. When the search engines figure it out, so be it. I’ve done my part in leaving them detailed instructions. ;-)
So, if you were pissed about the lack of full feed, you can now be elated that full feed is now available. Also, if you happen to link to my blog, please update your links to link to the root of the site now.
I also made a few other changes to the blog. The social networking category has now been renamed Facebook because let’s face it, that is the only social networking site I have any inkling to write about. In addition, the seo consulting page has also been changed to reflect a list of providers that I’m glad to recommend people too. Bottomline the little amount of time I spent consulting is not only even less now, the time that is alloted to it is pretty much unavailable. I also added the top posts sidebar from the main page to the blog navigation.
Last but not least, the other big and noticeable addition is that I’m going to see how the whole “advertising” thing works on this blog. Upon making a mention to a friend I was considering the addition, I received an email from the people over at the Aviva web directory (who by the way have a pretty damn good set of articles – my first run in with their site was due to their ten laws every blogger should know post) saying they wanted to grab the first slot. I’m not sure how the whole advertising thing sits with me and in the current design width, the amount of ads I will show is very limited. So, we’ll see how it goes and if I keep it. Note to advertisers: do not contact me if your site or service is unrelated or shit because I will not advertise it.
So now you’re caught up on the blogging administrative changes and reasonings… back to the regularly scheduled programming.
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Sugarrae runs on the Thesis WordPress Theme
If you’re someone who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality that you wouldn’t be able to obtain otherwise with a simple control panel instead of having to alter code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks.
For those "in between", like myself, I’ve created "dummy" guides for Thesis hooks that allow us to make more professional customizations than we ever deemed possible. The theme is not only highly customizable, but it has allowed me to run Sugarrae more professionally, with a much more targeted focus on monetization than it ever has been able to achieve before. You can find out more about Thesis below:
- Thesis Website and Demo
- Thesis Theme Review
- Thesis Tutorial: Hooks for Dummies
- More Thesis Tutorials on Sugarrae
