newlocation.info

UPDATE: I finally closed this service. I was the main user of the service and I didn’t need it anymore

My last personal project is alive. Its name: newlocation.info.

I had my blog and other stuff in a virtual server but I decided to shut it down. I didn’t need a entire server for a few things. My blog was one of the things I didn’t want to lose. I re-built it with jekyll and uploaded as a github page. Also, I changed its domain from blog.luisbosque.com to blog.luisico.net. Everything was fine until there.

The problem? My old content was indexed in search engines, like google’s one. I didn’t want to lose my content but I didn’t have anymore a handy nginx server to make my own redirections. So I created this service.

The idea is pretty simple. I create a redirection through the form. In my case, a redirection from blog.luisbosque.com to blog.luisico.net. It’s a 301 redirection. Also I want to keep the paths. This means that if I try to access to a old content in http://blog.luisbosque.com/2010/03/04/a-random-post/ I’m going to be redirected to http://blog.luisico.net/2010/03/04/a-random-post/ not just to http://blog.luisico.net/

So, at this point, the redirection service is already able to handle that. The only thing I need to do now is change my luisbosque.com domain and point blog.luisbosque.com to the redirection server name; in this case r.newlocation.info

That’s it. Anyone can keep accessing the old URL’s. Also search indexers are not going to lose any of my old content and they are going to learn that all my indexed content is now available in another domain.

It’s still a beta service. I’m planning to add some cool stuff like user signup in order to have more control over our own redirections, and maybe possibility to add regex redirections.

I believe that it’s a great tool for people that cares about SEO. There are a lot of possibilities, mainly for development purposes. And the best part is that it’s free =)