A couple of weeks ago, we allowed our previous url's (www.suburbankid.tk) redirection to our site to lapse. I want to say that we will not be relinking the redirect and from now on only suburban-kid.com will lead to this site.
This is mainly because the redirection itself wasn't so much a normal, 'official' redirect that you can usually do on your domain registrar (Goddady, Namecheap etc). The 'free' nature of the .tk domain, which made it attractive to us - or rather, me, as the team hadn't been formed yet - in the past, also came with severe limitations, one of them being that it was almost impossible to make a redirect when we decided to get a .com domain.
Well, the keyword is 'almost'; through a lot of googling and a dose of ingenuity, we managed to pull it off by attaching an empty webhost to the domain, and using that webhost to force the redirect. If it sounds like I'm speaking in Greek here, you can ignore all of that and simply know that we succeeded. But it was, quite plainly, a hack, and it was hard to maintain - the webhost itself required constant updating by logging into its dashboard, or it would expire, cutting off the redirect. Which kept happening, only I renewed it every time before the last.
Then there's the fact that .tk domains are just bad for search engine optimisation (SEO), mainly due to the fact that a lot of scam sites use them. That was why before today, you'd never be able to find Suburban KID on a Google results page, whereas now we're close to the top. Cutting off all links to that domain will hopefully provide us with an even cleaner slate to work with.
We'll consider setting up a small page at our old domain to remind users who still haven't realised that we're on suburban-kid.com now (seriously?), but the fact that our readership has remained steady even after the expiry of the redirect seems to indicate that it isn't much of an issue. Just thought we should let everyone know what's going on anyway, lest you're curious about the 404 page you'll get visiting our old domain. Have a great weekend!
