Why We Are Moving All WindowsXnews.com Domains to Everything-Microsoft.com

If you are a regular reader here on Ghacks you may know that I operate a few other sites besides my baby. Back when Windows 7 was just a rumor, I started a blog with Everton from Connected Internet which we named Windows 7 News. It was not clear if Microsoft would stick with the name for the operating system, or another name. Luckily for us, they kept it. And since we could not write about future operating systems on the blog, we decided to register Windows 8 and Windows 9 domains as well. While that worked great in theory, especially since it is almost certain that Microsoft will stick with the Windows 8 name, we felt the negative aspects as well.

Instead of just maintaining a single domain name, we had to maintain three, and would have to maintain even more in future years. The problem here was that this meant managing authors on three different sites, moderating comments, trying to come to agreements with advertisement companies, upgrading plugins or scripts, or fixing other issues. It also had an impact on the domain authority, as it was divided between the sites.

A single domain name on the other hand has a lot of advantages.

One domain name means one userbase and easier moderationEasier management of server upgrades, site updates and fixing of issuesOne email address for communication, instead of threeEasier communication with advertisers and authorsA stronger domain as links are all pointing to one site now and not threeFuture ProofVisitors do not have to read three sites to keep up to date. Now everything is posted on one site

That’s why we made the decision to move the sites to a central domain. The contents and authors will remain the same, only the domain name changes for the sites.

We have started to redirect the least important site first, windows9news.com to everything-microsoft.com. Tomorrow, we will be moving windows7news.com to the same site. All links pointing to the old sites will redirect to the same articles on the new site.

 

We will run the site this way for some time to see how everything settles in, before we finally move windows8news.com to the new domain as well.

Since it is a new domain I welcome you to check it out and let me know what you think of it. And if you are in a good mood, we’d love to see you spread the word around and give us some likes and +1s and tweets if you can spare any. In case you missed it, here is the domain name again: Everything Microsoft

We have decided to use a generic domain name so that we are able to cover all Microsoft related news, and not only Windows operating system news. While we have covered Office or Windows Server news lightly on the old sites, we plan to increase the coverage on the new site. If it is Microsoft related, we will cover it there.

The move is not without risks, and I hope that everything goes along as planned. I’m expecting that it will take at least a month before things settle in on the search engines. We may drop temporarily there and lose a good chunk of traffic, but unless we are flagged somehow by a search engine, the rankings should return to their former status after a while.