Gauravonomics Blog

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Here are five fail-proof ways to totally turn off your blog readers -

1. Host your blog on Blogger.
2. Insist that readers use a Blogger ID to comment.
3. Enable word verification.
4. Offer partial feeds.
5. Do not display your e-mail ID anywhere in the blog.

There are 71 million blogs out there. You have to be a very good writer if people are still putting up with all that.

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.

I started blogging at gauravonomics.blogspot.com and found my voice at gauravonomics.wordpress.com. However, when I moved to my own domain at gauravonomics.com, I realized that I had stayed at gauravonomics.wordpress.com for too long.

But, first, why should you move to your own yourblog.com domain anyway?

- Because you can do much more with your blog in terms of aesthetic, functionality and monetization.
- Because your blog is perceived as more professional and authoritative by both readers and search engines.
- Because it costs little in terms of time and money, so why not?

What happens when you move your Blogger or Wordpress blog to your own domain?

- You lose your pagerank and have to build it all over again. Even after three months, gauravonomics.com is still to get a pagerank while gauravonomics.wordpress.com has a pagerank of 5. Even Amit Varma - widely accepted as India’s best known non-techie blogger - made the same mistake and indiauncut.com has a pagerank of 3 while indiauncut.blogspot.com has a pagerank of 6.