An article titled How Search-Engine Rules Cause Sites to Go Missing came out today in the Wall Street Journal. It addresses the issue of changing a domain name for an established website, even as simple as changing from a .net domain to a .com domain.
The article goes into detail about how topix.net is changing to topix.com and how the owners are worried about the potential effect on their revenues and traffic from search engines. They requested assistance from Google who responded by suggesting topix.net post comments on a Google engineer blog asking for help; no other suggestions were provided other than ‘moving one section over to see what happens’.
I can understand Google’s dilemma of catering to individuals based on requests; however if they modify their algorithms for one person where would it stop. Unforutunately they hold the power no matter how much website owners hate them at times.
I can also sympathize with topix.net; especially a larger commercial site that receives more than 10 million website visitors per day, most of which come from search engines. If they did lose traffic from the search engines it could result in a absolute depletion of their revenues and livelihood.
What do you think?
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