SEO kicks my stats

Towards the end of the year, I received a notification reminding me to renew the domain for my blog. The domain in question was timor.site. This was the first invoice I had received from GoDaddy since they acquired Uniregistry, and to my dismay, it was significantly more expensive than what I had been accustomed to paying. With the year drawing to a close, I was reluctant to invest too much time or money into the renewal process. Frustrated by the cost, I decided to redirect my blog to another domain I owned: gagor.pl (where this blog was actually running in the past).

However, I hadn’t anticipated the impact this move would have on my blog’s SEO. Despite redirecting all the content without making any changes, there were noticeable differences in the results and traffic.

Let’s examine the raw data. The old domain, timor.site, appeared in search results over 150 times within roughly a month and I distinctly recall seeing a significant decrease in traffic in this time.

On the other hand, the new (technically old) domain, gagor.pl, garnered approximately 200 impressions over two months. During this period, one of the pages went viral, resulting in a considerable influx of traffic.

I also conducted an analysis of domain rank and other SEO metrics. Surprisingly, my gagor.pl domain boasted a rank of 4.6, whereas timor.site lagged far behind at 1.3. Despite its lower rank, the latter domain attracted more traffic. This served as a reminder of why I had initially opted for an international domain—to enhance its recognition on a global scale. However, the bilingual nature of my content, with occasional posts in Polish, could potentially confuse some of my followers.

It appears that the time has come to move forward and transform my site into a multilingual, with content segregated by language. This strategy should improve its international visibility and better align with the SEO requirements of my website.

Of course, this transition won’t be without its challenges—implementing multilingual support will necessitate a considerable number of redirects. But as they say, progress often comes at a cost.