Re: Moving domains

I agree with what Matthew says in that changing URIs shouldn't be done
lightly.

It probably doesn't make a huge amount of difference to your audience
whether you're an ac.uk or org.uk, although perhaps the latter
communicates your status as an organisation slightly more. Are there any
other reasons to motivate a move?

In terms of access to academic resources, I suspect that, where this
matters, the access would be based on e-mail addresses rather than
website URIs, so you could keep your e-mail addresses and change your
website. That said, I'm not sure how many resources use such a simple
method of academic authentication. (Incidentally, NMSI has recently
adopted the policy of using the domain names of the local museums for
e-mail addresses, except for when the ac.uk domain is required for
academic purposes). 

If you do decide to switch web domains, make sure that all requests for
pages on your current .ac.uk domain are redirected to the equivilent
page on your new domain, using the "301 Moved Permanently" code rather
than "307 Temporary Redirect", as this should help search engines and so
on to update their databases. See
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

You may also want to try and persuade major sites that link to you to
update their URLs, in order to preserve as much of your pagerank as
possible:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34464


Cheers,

Frankie Roberto
Science Museum website
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of 
> Brian Kelly
> Sent: 29 December 2006 20:23
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: .ac.uk domain
> 
> Hi Matthew
>    A couple of comments.
>    Changing URIs isn't something that should be done lightly
> - so raising this issue on this list is sensible.
>    I wrote an article on Guidelines For URI Naming Policies some time 
> ago - see <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/web-focus/>.
>    This article expans on Tim Berners-Lee's paper that /"//Cool URIs 
> don't change/, - see <http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html>.
>    Part of the rationale for this is the URI as an identifier of a 
> resource - and that identifier can be used for purposes other than as 
> the loication of a resource.  As an example, the Wikalong wiki-based 
> page annotation tool creates a  page on the Wikalong server based  on 
> the URL of the page being annotated. Change the URL and the annotatiom

> becomes dcoupled from the source - and is effectively lost.  Now 
> Wikalong is a significant service, as far as I know, who who knows 
> what valuable services may exist which assume persistency of the 
> British Museum URIs.
>    The other point to make is that you may lose your Google citation 
> data - and the British Museum is easily found using Google.  It would 
> be unfortunate if that was lost.  Maybe this won't happen, but the
> (undocumented) algorithms may well penalise changed domains (to combat

> spammers).
>    Perhaps it might be helpful to try and make contact with Google - 
> perhaps you are big enough and noteworthy enough for them to take 
> special measures.
>    Hope this is helpful.
> 
> Brian
>  
> --
> 
> -----------------------------------
> Brian Kelly
> UK Web Focus, UKOLN, University of Bath, BATH, UK, BA2 7AY
> Phone: +44 1225 383943
> Email:  [log in to unmask]
> 
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