Being chained to a 'lousy URL'

When you type fred wilson into google, you get my blog as the first result. It's been that way for the past three or four years. You also get my bio on the Union Square Ventures weblog, the wikipedia entry on me, my tumblog, and my twitter feed, all on the first google result page. I am getting a ton of "organic" value out of google. I haven't really tried to achieve this. I've just been an active social media participant and this is the result.

I've thought about moving my blog from this lousy URL (avc.blogs.com) to something better. But I can never get past the google juice issue. If you type scoble blog into google, you still get his old blog that he moved from in 2005 as the top link. Google doesn't forget so easily.

And google juice is important for all sorts of reasons. Take my post yesterday about Zemanta. If you type zemanta into google, that post is already the seventh link on the first page of google's results. That's largely because [avc.blogs.com] has some serious google juice.

It's not like this blog relies on google for traffic. Here's the stats on the most recent 30 days:

When you factor out the other search engines, google is responsible for about 30 percent of the visits to this blog. That's pretty low compared to most web services I've seen over the years.

But back to the Zemanta search. People who are searching on Zemanta are the kind of people I'd like to visit this blog. I want placement on those serps and the google juice this blog has gets them for me.

So I think I am stuck at avc.blogs.com for the long haul. I've come to accept it and I don't fret too much about it anymore. I've got my personal URL at fredwilson.vc and the traffic there is growing. I use it for different things and this blog has gotten to be more about business and that blog has gotten to be more personal. And if this blog is about business, then google juice is an incredibly important business asset.