I’m new to Domain of One’s Own and have just a few users so far. An interesting question came up about subdomains. One of the great things about DoOO is users can take their work with them when they leave from the university. For SEO purposes they want to keep the same domain even after they leave. My instinct is to tell them that they should get a top level domain if they know they’ll depart eventually and don’t want to change their domain. Does that sound like the right advice?
Thanks!
Janet Swatscheno
Digital Publishing Librarian
University of Illinois at Chicago
Thanks for reaching out. Yes, unfortunately once a student leaves the university if they have a site using the university domain they wouldn’t be able to move this over to Reclaim Hosting or another hosting provider so it would definitely make sense to recommend they get a top level domain. If they don’t mind swapping URLs, then once they graduate they could purchase a TLD through Reclaim Hosting and we can migrate their site and swap over the URL at no charge.
If you have any other questions please let us know.
For SEO purposes, if they do a 301 redirect for the subdomain pages to the new site, depending on crawl time within a couple weeks (at least when I did this 6 years ago when moving to my own tld) Google should transfer the pagerank etc to the new domain.
(When I did this, I used the html meta http-equiv tag in the html files on the old domain, which apparently is not currently the recommended approach.)