Thursday, February 20, 2014

Changed Address/URL of this Blog



I started this Blog in the year 2008 with the URL qualitypoint.blogspot.com, and I had posted lot of articles (This is 1094th post).

I use this blog to share my knowledge and experience of Software Testing, QTP (Quick Test Professional), Web development (php/mysql/javascript), Social Media promotion and SEO (Search Engine optimization). Apart from these things, sometimes I used this blog for publishing latest news articles also.

Since I used this blog for sharing various different things, people who are interested in some particular thing (e.g reading qtp tutorial) faced difficulty to find their interested topics from this blog. So, I had decided to start individual websites for each topic. Started qtpbook.com for sharing Software testing and QTP Tutorials and RtoZ.Org for publishing latest news.

This approach is useful for visitors to find relevant content easily. Though, I started many topic specific websites, I just kept this blog also to publish some random posts. Few years back Google Blogger made some changes so that Blogger blogs will have country-specific TLD. For example, this blog will appear as qualitypoint.blogspot.in in India, and as qualitypoint.blogspot.co.uk in United Kingdom.

To avoid this inconsistency of this blog URL, I changed this blog url using Custom domain option in Blogger Dashboard. The New URL is www.blog.qualitypointtech.com

Actually I wanted to give the name as blog.qualitypointtech.com (i-e without www). But I couldn't make the blogger to redirect the traffic from www version. i-e www.blog.qualitypointtech.com won't work. I tried various ways by adding CNAME and ARecords in DNS manager and by choosing redirect option in Blogger. Nothing worked. So, I have decided to keep www.blog.qualitypointtech.com as the main blog url. And, blog.qualitypointtech.com will be redirected to www.blog.qualitypointtech.com. I am curious to know whether anyone was successful in giving custom sub domain name without www for their Blogger blog. (it should redirect the www version properly)

For setting custom domain name, we need to give the custom domain name under settings->basic in Dashboard of Blogger. We will see an error message when doing this. We have to add the verification code found in the error message as CNAME record in DNS manager of the Domain provider for verifying ownership of the domain name. And, we have to add ghs.google.com as CNAME record value for the domain name.


I have selected Redirect option for redirecting non-www version to www version in the Blogger dashboard itself. But it didn't work properly. So, I added another CNAME record in DNS manager to redirect non-www version to www version.


After making these changes, I think everything is working fine. Let me know if you still face any difficulty in accessing this blog.

I had to clear the DNS cache by running "ipconfig /flushdns" to test the changes.

Adding separate websites for each topic had created lot of duplicate content which affected Search Rank of this blog.
So, I added 301 permanent redirect rules in .htaccess file of qtpbook.com so that both users and search engines will be redirected to this blog. And, I added canonical url in TheQuotes.Net so that search engines will be instructed to refer this blog content while the actual users will be seeing the TheQuotes.Net content.

And, I am planning to use  www.brokenlinkcheck.com for finding broken links in this blog.

I hope all these things will improve the SEO friendliness and user-friendliness of our blogs and websites. Let me know if you have any suggestions to improve it further.



You can subscribe to our Email posts, and you can subscribe to our blog feed.

No comments:

Search This Blog