Please update your links with new url EFL2.0 (GooglePR, UPV, IIS Windows, headaches)

Yes, I’m kindly asking you to update your links and bookmarks to this blog. The URL is not longer http://maberui.webs.upv.es but http://efl20.com.

Please help me get my Google PageRank back, among other things.

Here’s the why:

This blog is hosted at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Why? Well, when I started blogging I opted for a self-hosted WP installation and since the UPV offers free disk space to staff and students. I didn’t think of the consequences, of course. They set up a space for me, with a url containing my UPV username: maberui (yep, my full name is María Elena Benito Ruiz), i.e. maberui.webs.upv.es  WHAT A GREAT URL!!! I called the blog EFL2.0 (and you know I thought of changing this too, but I thought it was too risky after 2 years blogging) but the url was still maberui.webs.upv.es, which is an alias itself anyway. So I complained, and they said I could change the Blog URL and Wordpress installation url to this new alias I bought a couple of years ago http://efl20.com

I wasn’t really confident about the change, because as I had to explain to them, I was going to lose PR for sure and I would need some sort of 301 redirection. But still, I preferred the efl20.com url instead, easier to remember. They said nothing would happen, and encouraged me to change it. So I did,  and after 2 weeks, the Google PageRank dropped from 5 to 3…I got kinda angry, I must admit it. And why? why should I give that much importance and relevance to GooglePR? Well, I don’t know, because I don’t make money out of this blog, I don’t monetize through Google Adsense or something like that. But it’s just the payoff. Right after Christmas 08, this blog’s PR got increased to 5. And I guess all the links or most of them are to http://maberui.webs.upv.es/whatevercontent instead. Bad.

I asked the UPV admin to do a 301 redirection, since the server runs on IIS-Windows (meaning I can’t do that on my own) but they say they can’t either. So I’ll have to find another way, a php redirection or something, and cross fingers.

In the meantime, I guess Google will think that I have duplicated content on the web (two aliases for just one blog) and will punish the blog ranking for that (there’s no answer from Google webmasters at their forums, very nice people indeed).

I guess some of you might think it was a bad move after all, that once the blog got a PR5 with such an ugly url (http://maberui.webs.upv.es) I shouldn’t have changed it. But I thought that efl20 is definitely shorter and more friendly and that 301 redirections wouldn’t be so difficult, as well as I trust Google’s supposedly smart systems.

But in the meantime, while the mess is sorted out, I’d kindly ask you to update your links to the blog from your blogrolls or whatever, if you can do that for me, I’d really appreciate.

Thanks!

PS: I’ve learned many lessons from all this, for instance about servers, about relying on IIS-Windows, UPV, etc.

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