New Domain Name: Scrum-Breakfast.com

Well, I’d been meaning to do this for a long time, but the painfully long http://scrum-breakfast.blogspot.com is now just www.scrum-breakfast.com (and as soon as the last DNS update takes place, just “scrum-breakfast.com” will work too).

I’ve also started two sister blogs:

• training.scrum-breakfast.com – Scrum courses, posted in English
• ausbildung.scrum-breakfast.com – Scrum courses, posted in German

Why do the change now? Well google made me do it.

I discovered that blogger.com/blogspot.com is actually a very nice “poor man’s CMS“. A couple of nice layouts, easy RSS feads, nice customization. With tag searches, I can create links to groups of articles, like “next scheduled Scrum Courses” or “next Scrum Breakfast“. The only disadvantage was kind of long domain names, like “zurich-scrum-breakfast.blogspot.com”. Or so I thought.

Yesterday I looked at google analytics and discovered I wasn’t getting any referrals from google any more. Huh? Previously, I was getting at least 30 per day. What happened? I tried a search for peter stevens scrum, sprint zero or even scrum blog, queries which usually produced a top 10 placement, and discovered I was no longer in the top 200 results. 🙁

It looks like the domain names, layouts and contents of scrum-breakfast blog and the new blogs were too similar, and google decided they looked like SEO spamming sites, sites which pretend to look independent but really only have the purpose of artificially inflating their page ranking. Or perhaps google decided to rank the newer blogs higher, even though they have virtually no content.

So I have not only put everything under one domain (so the relationships will be clearer), but also made the content more unique and minimized linking back and forth between the sites. Hopefully google will realize they’ve done me wrong and reinstate scrum-breakfast.com to its previous standing.

If anyone has any ideas on how to fix this problem, I’d really appreciate the help! Thanks.