The site now runs on weisay.com. The old veisin.com domain remains registered, but only as a backup and secondary address. The hosting plan was upgraded too: storage went from 50 MB to 100 MB. The previous IIS connection limit was just 40, which caused frequent Service Unavailable errors and was genuinely frustrating. The new limit is 100, so things should be steadier.
Changing domains was not something I wanted to do casually. It can affect search engine indexing and the clicks that come from search results, so I spent some time planning around those risks. The blog used to sit in the root directory; this time I placed it in a blog folder. That change would have broken existing links, so I set up 301 redirects. After about two days of testing and adjustments, the automatic redirection is essentially working.
A 301 redirect — a permanent move — is an important automatic redirect technique. From an SEO point of view, it is one of the most practical ways to handle a changed URL. Once a site moves to a new domain, search engines index the new address while passing the old address's external links over to it. That helps avoid a drop in ranking simply because the domain changed. Using a 301 permanent redirect to point several domains at a site's main domain should not hurt rankings either.
Any link under veisin.com should now redirect automatically to weisay.com, so search engine visitors should not land on a broken page. The main goal is to help search engines update their records instead of treating the site as entirely new and indexing everything from scratch, which would be a lot more troublesome. I'd also appreciate it if friends who link to the site could update their URLs. I plan to keep using this domain for the long term, and veisin.com will remain registered as well.
Baidu seems slower to react to 301 redirects, while Google has been much more cooperative. Either way, as long as visitors coming from search results can open the pages they clicked, I'm not too worried about the indexing details.
The final PJBlog3 release was announced recently, and I upgraded right away. That version added related posts, which should have been a nice feature, but I already use wbc's enhanced related posts. Since that version does more of what I need, I removed the built-in related posts from the program.
With a new domain and more server room, it feels like a fresh start. I'll keep working on it.