Need some advice :)
a) Facts:
1. Currently, we have a blog www.thebigbigsky.net hosted on blogspot.com. The site has been up for around a year and google had cached some of the posts.
2. The idea for setting up the blog was to promote/share articles/write-up about personal development and self-growth, and also to offer counseling services related to them.
3. There is another subdomain - chinese.thebigbigsky.net hosting similar blog posts but in Chinese. This is hosted on blogspot as well.
b) What we want to do:
1. We did some research on the internet and understood that, to make a website more popular, it is better to have a domain name that is related to the content of the site. Hence, in our case, a domain name containing "personal development" would be more ideal and easier for people to remember.
2. Hence, we are thinking to move away from blogspot to a meaningful new domain (example: personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com) and move all contents there. The new domain will be hosted on a hosting provider e.g. hostgator.com
c) Here are the steps we have in mind:
1. Register the new domain (example: personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com)
2. Get a hosting provider hostgator.com
3. Setup a new site based on Wordpress, import all contents from existing blog to this new site - personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com.
4. Switch current blog back to thebigbigsky.blogspot.com
5. Switch DNS of www.thebigbigsky.net to point to the new site on hostgator.com
6. On hostgator.com, setup permanent redirect 301 of www.thebigbigsky.net to point to personaldevelopmetnwithxyz.com by following the tutorial mentioned here - http://www.blogbloke.com/migrating-redirecting-blogger-wordpress-htaccess-apache-best-method/
Questions:
1. Will it have major impact on the current google pagerank or SEO of thebigbigsky.net? As the site is not that popular, we assumed that the impact would not be a major one.
2. Is the domain personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com considered too long? (For SEO etc)
3. Steps c.4 and c.5 above - Will this work for our case?
4. How about the subdomain - chinese.thebigbigsky.net? We would like keep it as separate blog with the domain e.g. chinese.personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com
5. We added "facebook comments" to the existing post on www.thebigtbigsky.net and would not want to lose it. Will the comments still be there after we moved to the new domain?
6. Any better idea to do it? :)
Thank you very much!
regards,
-chan