You're Not Stuck with Your TypePad Domain

From the "What is the Biggest Mistake You've Made as a Blogger"...

I own my domain, but it wasn’t showing up in Technorati, so I switched back to a Typepad subdomain. Really stupid, and now I’m stuck with it for fear of losing traffic.

Dude...  Fear not.  Your TypePad links will still work.  Nothing changes to the underlying URL structure.

Compare:

http://www.typepadhacks.org/2008/04/scents-and-cent.html

and

http://johntunger.typepad.com/typepadhacks/2008/04/scents-and-cent.html

And here's one other tidbit.  You can create a robots.txt file on the TypePad domain, do a URL removal request from Google for the TypePad pages, create another robots.txt with a link to your personal domain's sitemap xml content, and be re-indexed correctly by Google within a couple of days.

It's true.  This is exactly what I did for our client, White Trash Mom.  She was worried, just like you were.  But the people at Google are smart, and they figured out what we were doing pretty quickly.

Now go back and map your domain in TypePad and get crackin' on your blog.  There are so many reasons why you want to do this beyond the obvious one.

Comments

[Posted: Apr 11, 2008 8:28:05 AM]

Dude,

Give me a quote!

Rich

[Posted: Apr 11, 2008 12:47:39 PM]

Any DIY info. on the robots.txt file? Will duplicate urls affect other search engines?

[Posted: Apr 26, 2008 4:49:26 PM]

I'm so happy I found you guys! I have told EVERYONE about you---and you know how important my word is--ha! Best money I ever spent!

[Posted: Apr 26, 2008 10:16:13 PM]

I should have charged more. ;)

[Posted: Apr 26, 2008 10:20:55 PM]

Hubert:

The URL removal in Google is straight forward and simple. I have not done the removal exercise with Yahoo or MSN. When I tackle that, I'll let you know.

I'll do a little writeup on robots.txt shortly.

[Posted: May 3, 2008 7:34:34 PM]

Along these lines, do you know if it's possible to overwrite the variable(s) that TypePad uses for a blog's url? (e.g. $MTBlogURL$) Or any other method of getting the same result?

It would be great if I could do a global change so that the links in my blog always use my domain instead of the TypePad domain.

Cheers,
Eric

[Posted: May 3, 2008 8:02:27 PM]

Eric:

That's exactly what happens when you map you domain to a blog or photo gallery within Typepad. It's done for you so that you don't have to do it yourself.

When you re-publish your blog after mapping, all the URLs for all posts and pages are set properly, and you never have to worry about it again. Don't forget that re-publish step, though. That's when the $MTBlogURL variable containing the domain name gets applied.

[Posted: May 5, 2008 9:10:52 PM]

Please, please, take pity on me. The people at Typepad have been rather unhelpful, except in my monthly charge. I have a cooking site. Therefore, having recipes show up in Google results is crucial to getting any cooking traffic. But my results, say for a pork tenderloin recipe, turn up (if at all) something like this:

Blog Name: Post Title, blog description (Favorite recipes for home cooks, blah, blah, blah).

Meanwhile, my competition has something like this:
Juicy Grilled Pork Tenderloin, Pork Tenderloin marinated in a garlic ginger soy sauce, and grilled to delightful perfection.

Um....which one would you choose? I don't even know what the problem is in order to fix it, but my many recipes are just either not showing up or showing up with lame results. I'm using a basic Typepad template, have limited technical skills, and can't get Typepad to tell me why individual recipe descriptions aren't showing up. I'd love to know how to fix this, because I'm about to give up. The only traffic I have now is from the few technorati users I ping -- none from Google.

Thank you!

[Posted: May 5, 2008 10:35:52 PM]

Trevy:

Check out the Search Engine Optimization for TypePad Hack Store entry.

There's a Do-it-Yourself tutorial, or you can just hire us to do it for you.

John and I talk on the phone once or twice a week, and in our last phone call, we came up with another search engine optimization hack for TypePad that we haven't written up yet. This one is for key word META tags. I'll get around to writing it up eventually.

I'll take a look at your blog and see if there are any other opportunities for improvement.

[Posted: May 5, 2008 11:47:06 PM]

Trevy:

There are two major issues I see right off the bat.

1. You have no dynamic page titles whatsoever. Not exactly sure why this is since you say you're using a basic template. I find that odd.

2. I think you've mapped your domain to your base TypePad account and not to your specific blog. See the extra folder called "home_cooks" on every permalink? The permalinks should be \\ or \\\ or whatever.

All those permalinks with the extra folder name don't appear in the browser's address bar when you click on them, and that's REALLY strange.

Now, I'm starting to put together the detailed picture. I think you're experiencing a domain mapping and/or redirect and domain masking issue!

Nonetheless, you've got a significant issue here that needs to be addressed if you are to have any results with Google.

Hope this helps.

[Posted: Jul 9, 2008 4:58:29 PM]

Would love to see the robots.txt tutorial and how to do this whole thing.