Would YOU change your website to a blog under the following circumstances? I started my site in March 08, with a subject I'm passionate about. DMOZ listed it straightaway - which I'm very grateful for. My site comes up as the top result for a few of my best keyphrases in MSN, Live and Yahoo - though not Google yet. It has a PR of 3. I put a lot of effort into the content and it's important to me that it's good, unique, up-to-the-minute articles etc. I put adsense on my pages three weeks ago and am happy with the result. I'm finding it very time-consuming to put up new pages with my current website. And I really like the edgy, 2.0 look and functionality of magazine style blogs. With a blog I could post new content every day. (and maybe Google would pay my site some attention ) So, would you change it over if it was your site? I would keep all the page URLS - but... Would doing this somehow wreck my PR rating? Would search engines drop my site? Would DMOZ drop my site for changing it? Is it easier to put adsense on a conventional website than a blog? (I can choose to put adsense anywhere I want at the moment.) Thanks for any help!
For me I prefer a blog because I think it's layout is more liked by search engines. Don't worry about the PR if it goes down you can recover it back for sure and for more. It's easy to put adsense ads with blogs like wordpress, they have good plugins.
You should do it, but you also should redirect all the old urls to the new urls to maintain your link juice. How to do that you will find here: seobook.com/archives/001714.shtml
It really depends. If you change your site, it means you'll lose your indexing for sure. If you change your niche, you'll lose your pr. If you don't fix the 404 errors, you'll lose your Pr. If Dmoz notices your site when your just building it and there are no posts and all, they'll surely whack your listing. These are all the negative aspects. But, even then, blogging is so much fun! Best of luck.
Sorry, I dont agree 100% godsofchaos. If he keeps the page urls he will keep his indexing. And dmoz editors know that sites are rebuild and will check back a second time. And PR is not lost, Google gives PR all the time, but we dont see that PR, we only see the toolbar updates. And 301 redirections in .htaccess should be used to redirect from old page to new pages.
Thanks for all answers! Am new to blogging, but am experimenting with putting a blog on a somewhat dud domain name, and seeing how it all works. Seems that with permalinks - your links look exactly the same as with a conventional website. And yeah, I know that the toolbar PR is not the real google PR, but other people visiting your site seem to care. Everyone here seems pretty positive about a blog - maybe I should make the switch and see what happens. Re DMOZ - I could give my site more functionality, therefore better for users (unless DMOZ prefers conventional websites to blogs) Wish there was a way of building the whole blog without anyone seeing it - then dump my current website and move the blog straight into it. Surely there's a way - but my brain has gone into deep freeze. kewlchat - that's a good idea - though I think I've read that to have the blog as your main website is what brings traffic in, not as a subdomain.
Exactly. keep your web template, but add a blog. I am considering do that to one of my sites. The only drawback to that is that you will have to maintain two templates (your main website and the blog template). So global graphic and design changes will be twice as much work...
Just go with a blog. If you dont have thousands of visitors every day you dont have anything to lose to remake the site. Visitors will come back anyhow.
I would change it to a blog style site (in fact, I already started like that )...especially for a small to medium site. For a big site probably you would have to change it to something like Drupal, Joomla & co (more powerful content management system)