Last week I finally sat down and got things done. Annoying things. At the top of my list was finally acknowledging the scary letter my mum got from the London Olympics people and moving my Olympics site off of the probably-dodgy and copyright-infringing domain London-2012-Games.com to a new, less offensive (hopefully) domain.
I chose the domain OGamesGuide.com which I’m hoping these vultures don’t find any offense with. It has the word ‘games’ in it which I doubt has been copyrighted (would that even be possible?), plus it’s not specific to London which means I can use it over and over for future Games (I have a sneaking suspicion that my domain Rio-2016-Olympics.com won’t fly).
So last week I sat down and forced myself to sort this mess out. It meant transferring my site to the new domain and then uploading files with PHP 301 redirects (to direct each page of my old domain to the new domain, link juice and all) in them to each of my existing pages on the London-2012-Games.com domain. It was about 70 or 80 files, it was annoying, but now it’s done and I’m glad to get this worry out of my head.
I have a feeling that they might still ask me to remove the domian completely or give it to them (I’d rather delete it!) but, for now, these little 301 redirect babies have my new domain in the same spot as the old one already. So if you do a search for ‘London 2012 Games’ I’m on page one and if you look for ‘London 2012 Olympics’ I’m hanging in there at page two with no mention of the old domain name at all. True, I still have ‘Olympics’ splattered all over my pages but this is easily removed if I get any hassles. It’s all a bit of a learning experience and I’m curious to see what happens. So I’m happy to have this sorted out for now and extremely happy to see my new domain slotted nicely where the old domain was. I wasn’t expecting that to happen at all. I didn’t realise 301s were so powerful.
Because of the uncertainty of my old domain I put link building on hold for this site but I’m going to ramp it up again with the goal of getting to the front page of Google for both of my search terms. I want to get enough links to the new domain (and change old inbound links) so that if the Olympics people complain about the redirects and I have to remove the old domain, the new domain will be able to keep its position.
I love it when annoyingness is solved without too much hassle. I was dreading this whole process but it’s been relatively painless. Hopefully the scary lawyers have been appeased although I feel like if I’m lurking on page one, I’ll always be on their radar and they might always be looking for something to get me for. But, for the moment, I’m not too worried anymore.
Thanks for the advice, everyone! What do you think of this solution? Scary lawyers abated or is this the beginning of a bigger war?
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