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Not moving to my own domain at the right time is not the only blogging mistake I made. When I did move to my own domain, I made the mistake of installing Wordpress in the gauravonomics.com/blog directory instead of the root directory.
This is a bad idea because it means that my homepage is duplicated at gauravonomics.com and gauravonomics.com/blog. Search engines and Technorati consider these two as separate blogs and therefore my Google Pagerank and Technorati ranking are adversely affected.
Daniel from Daily Blog Tips had made the same mistake when he set up his blog, but corrected it within a few months.
Taking Daniel’s lead, I decided to move Wordpress to the root directory last night. However, something went wrong and my blog was down for most of the night. I tried everything Ajay and I could think of, but it just didn’t work! I haven’t had a more frustrating night ever! In the end, in the wee hours of the morning, I decided to abandon the operation and revert to my backups.
The silver lining? I recovered everything on my own and that’s a big thing for the novice blogger that I am. Also, it seems that I have only lost the few comments that were made after I backup up my database and everything else is working as before. A big thanks to everybody who e-mailed me to tell me that my blog was displaying errors. If you see that something is still broken, do let me know.
So, does it mean that I’ll stay with gauravonomics.com/blog? Well, now that the bug is in my head, I’ll not be satisfied until I have either moved Wordpress to the root directory or done something else with the root directory itself. Any ideas?
Another blogging mistake you must not make - write a guest post for a much more popular blogger, get linked on DesiPundit and participate in a collaborative blogging project on the same day and then take your blog down the very same day by trying to do something over-ambitious on the back-end. 
Comments (5)
TVIMH is more popular than your blog?
@Ajay: Of course, it is. Just look at the number of comments on each of Mel’s posts.
Sorry, I don’t understand the issue of having it at /blog. You are redirecting anyone who comes to .com to /blog. Why should technorati even think that the .com domain is the blog? Just claim the /blog domain and you are all set. That’s what I did and I don’t think anything is messed up…
Am I missing something?
@Shripriya: OK, here’s an illustration of how yourdomain.com/blog messes things up. First see this, then see this. There are back-links in both the lists that aren’t included in the other. Got it?
Did you claim both urls as your blog? I don’t have the same problem at all since I never claimed .com as a blog.
http://technorati.com/search/shripriya.com/blog
http://technorati.com/search/shripriya.com
There is a one link difference b/c the /blog is recognized as a blog and updates more slowly.
You will solve the problem if you “release” .com as a blog.
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[…] have set up a brand new homepage at gauravonomics.com, putting an end to the ‘what should I do with the root directory?’ question. In retrospect, it all worked out well because, if I had set up my original blog on the […]