Getting To This Blog Has Gotten Harder
I suppose many of you know this. And I’d like to thank those of you who have reached out to me to tell me about these problems. Since I don’t read this blog in a feed reader and I don’t search for it, I was not initially aware of these problems. I am now and we are trying to fix them. Here’s what’s been happening:
1) When we moved from avc.blogs.com to avc.com, we messed up the 301 redirect. With typepad’s help and the help of Nathan, Andrew, and Eric, we got a working 301 redirect up and we are slowly getting our google juice back. But it’s been largely gone from this blog for the past 45 days. You cannot get here by searching for fredwilson, avc, or a vc, the three most popular search terms for this blog over the past five years. I am sorry about that and I am seeing signs that they are all coming back. Just this morning, all three terms got a front page result on google, the first time that’s happened. Prior to moving URLs, this blog was the first result for all three terms.
2) The primary feed for this blog http://feeds.feedburner.com/AVc got screwed up. I still am not entirely sure what happened with that because we switched blog URLs at almost the exact same time that Google/FeedBurner moved that feed over to their new Google powered service. You’ll note that if you ask for this blog’s feed now, you’ll get http://feedproxy.google.com/AVc. Those are one and the same URL and you do not need to update to the new URL in your feedreader. But for some reason, possibly related to the move of this blog’s domain, those URLs got messed up and the main feed was not updating for a while. I am told this has been fixed for the past several weeks so everyone who is subscribed to the main feed should be getting the updates in your feed reader. Please tell me if that is not the case.
2) The secondary feed for this blog http://feeds.feedburner.com/AVcVentureCapitalAndTechnology which delivers only my vc/tech posts is still messed up and has not updated since early August. I just realized that this feed was messed up as well and we are working to fix it now.
These screwups have had an impact on readership but it’s not been terrible. Here are the google analytics stats on this blog for the month before and the month after switching domains:
30 days before:
30 days after:
Some of this drop is probably atrributable to august so maybe this blog lost 5-10% of its readership because of these screwups. And search traffic has declined from 35% of traffic to 27% of traffic during the same time.
When I look at the "reach" stat in feedburner which is the number of people who actually read the blog via a feedreader each day, I don’t see much of a decline in that number for the main feed, but a big drop in the number of people who read the vc/tech only posts. As I said, I am on that now and I’ll get it fixed.
Again, I am sorry for these screwups and we are working to get them fixed. Moving domains and moving feeds hasn’t gone as smoothly as I’d hoped but because so many of you are loyal readers, it’s likely to be a blip not a catastrophe.
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Comments (Archived):
just yesterday I spent 1/2 hour going through toluu and gReader to see where the feed of this blog disappeared
i am sorry about that. which feed had you subscribed to?
the main one, subscribed again and now everything seems to be working, I hope it stays that way 😉
Fred,another potential factor: the my yahoo process changed. I read your posts via my yahoo – your blog has a box on my yahoo page, fed by your feed. When my yahoo redesigned they introduced a layered reader, i.e., if a user clicks on a link, a layer pops up called the my yahoo reader and the post can be read in it without having to visit A VC – I bet it doesn’t count in your metrics. Not sure when all my yahoo users migrated to the new redesign, but I believe it happened at roughly the same time as your move from avc.blogs.com to avc.comRich
I saw that my.yahoo popup quick read thing yesterday. As a publisher I hate it but as a reader I like it
For what it’s worth – we all still love ya’! I’ve been reading daily via google reader since Jan or so and haven’t had any problems (just a small hiccup of ‘test’ posts while you were figuring out reblogging comments – but nothing that was a real problem).You keep hitting the content out of the park like you always do and readers will jump through fire to read it all…
I don’t plan to inject fire between me and you all!
…and I thought you were on a blog vacation for a month!
No you were just on vacation from me! I hope you enjoyed it
Nice sparklines!
The other Fred Wilson is probably pretty pumped up about all of this….
It turns out I broke your VC & Tech posts feed during the redesign. You had some custom RSS templates that I missed copying over when building the new design. Feedburner was still showing the old content so the breakage didn’t become obvious until the feed got noticeably out of date.The VC & Tech feed is now fixed and updating. My apologies to Fred and everyone inconvenienced by the feed mixup.
Re: the Google PageRank and 301 Redirects:Anyone who’s had a typepad.com domain for a long time should know that they’ll take a similar PageRank hit if they turn on TypePad’s domain mapping to start using a custom URL.Domain Mapping *does not* preserve old incoming links by using redirects. Instead TypePad serves *both* yourdomain.com and yourdomain.typepad.com which doesn’t transfer PageRank.
No worries Fred. I subscribe over email to your daily posts and read them first thing every morning 🙂
This is a great lesson to us all and our companies. It would be good to have the lessons listed. I bet if you had been selling a product, you would have seen your dollar income decline rapidly! Good luck to Nathan.
How did you get hold of avc.com?
I waited and waited for it to become available and then made them an offerthey couldn’t refuse when they stopped using it actively
It’s your comment system. You’ve lost all the comment juice.
The value of the comments SEO pales in comparison to the value of theconversation
when i stopped noticing the updates on my yahoo feed, i just switched to email alert. would be interesting to know if you got an uptick in people switching to email notofication.
Welcome back to my life Fred!
I’m happy to be back