hi my name is chris makarsky

Getting to the root of things

Hello and welcome to my brand-new site!

Wait, why are you saying it’s not new? You’ve been here before? But that can’t be… unless… oh, now I understand — you’re thinking of chrismakarsky.com/blog. That was a totally different site; no, this is plain-and-simple chrismakarsky.com.

What’s the difference? Well, for one thing, the new site no longer has that /blog subfolder. And… well, that’s about it.

OK, so it’s not really a new site. But I’m also no longer 301-redirecting from chrismakarsky.com to chrismakarsky.com/blog. You see, to search engines (especially blog-specific search services), the difference between /blog and no /blog is huge. Despite having the permanent redirect in place, it looks like I have two different sites with content duplicated across both. And that’s bad news to a search engine bot.

Because some people link to chrismakarsky.com while others link to chrismakarsky.com/blog, sites track those differently as well; for example, Technorati has different rankings for both sites. You’d think that any link for /blog would automatically count towards the root as well, but it doesn’t appear to work that way. And some casual observers claim the duplication hurts your Google page rank, effectively splitting the rank between the two sites.

It’s madness, I tell you.

For lack of time and fear of losing whatever meager rank my site currently has, I didn’t want to make the change to my site’s directory structure, but then I drank a few beers and here we are. The process was remarkably simple; for Wordpress specifically, it took about two minutes to follow these directions, another five minutes to make a few template changes, and a few more after that to finish my beer.

To cut a bad entry short: if you have my site bookmarked at chrismakarsky.com/blog, you should get rid of the /blog. The same goes if you’re linking to my site; there’s a redirect setup and all, but, you know. And for those of you with your blog installed in a subdirectory — well, I was once like you. But then I got me a brand-new site.