As you might recall, I decided to split my website into two separate websites. I moved content (mainly my services pages) over to Hartzer.com, leaving my 1000+ blog posts here on this blog. I’ll continue to blog and write news articles here on BillHartzer.com. The goal is to make BillHartzer.com more of a blog and news site–while moving my SEO Consulting business over to Hartzer.com and Hartzer Consulting.
It’s been five days since I completed the move of these pages and launching Hartzer.com with new content. What’s important to note here a few things:
- I moved and 301 redirected certain pages from BillHartzer.com to Hartzer.com.
- I added a “few” new links to Hartzer.com, the new site
- The Hartzer.com site and entire domain has had a disallow all directive in the robots.txt file for several years.
- The Hartzer.com domain name was on a former topic–labrador retrievers–and really had nothing to do with SEO, search engine marketing, marketing, or even technology for that matter.
- I have changed/updated the Google My Business listing at my business address to reflect the new site. Changed the GMB website listed to the new domain name, Hartzer.com, and changed the business name on the listing.
- The BillHartzer.com footer has an image link to the Hartzer.com site. This is significant, for two issues: Both domain names are hosted on the same server. Both sites do use Cloudflare, so I believe they’ll be using a different IP address, though.
You can go back to the last post (linked at the top of this post) to see why and what has been changed and moved. I also added some background information, as well.
So far, after 5 days, though, I have noticed significant changes:
- So far it appears that there are about 56 pages indexed on Hartzer.com. This is up from initially about 5-10 pages the first day. Total of about 150 pages were moved.
- The site is beginning to take over some rankings from the old site. For example, the BillHartzer.com site was ranking for “Domain Name Expert Witness” and had a featured snippet. Now, that has moved to Hartzer.com and the Hartzer.com site has the featured snippet.
- The site is ranking #2 for it’s name. This is interesting, as one of the links added and a mention added by me was Crunchbase.com, and that’s ranking number currently. I believe that’s probably due to PageRank or the “authority” of that domain name.
- Hartzer.com takes over 7 of the top 10 search results for that name. The others are my SEJ bio and my services page on BillHartzer.com, which actually has been moved already. Google’s SERP isn’t reflecting the fact that that page has been moved.
So far, 5 days after the move of a lot of pages from BillHartzer.com to Hartzer.com, formerly a dog website, is going well. Google is, in fact, responding like it should, and faster than I would expect. I’m seeing some rankings today on the new site, which is good. I expect the whole process to take a few more weeks.
As for BillHartzer.com, I have actually made some posts that were more newsy/journalistic type posts, and those ranked extremely well, better than expected, actually. So, that’s looking good so far. I have submitted the site to Google News, and we’ll see how that goes. If I end up getting into Google News, great. If not, then that’s okay with me, too.