1. Every link on the web will be broken and people wont be able to find the content again on my website;
2. All the indexes on search engines will be broken, i.e. pointing to the non existent files;
3. How fast will the new pages show up in Google search results?

All of the above being a reason to loose popularity and visitors.

With this in mind I tried to make the change as easy as possible to my faithful readers and with a simple script I managed to produce a table mapping all the old website URLs to the new ones. This way I could take care of the two first points above, but what about number three? That one is out of my control!

Surprise, surprise! Less than 24 hours later the new pages are already on the results page, and I didn’t tell Google to re-index my website.

The nice thing about this is that both links will still work and visitors will be happy. Now it’s just a matter of time before the old pages are dropped from Google’s index.

While looking at my website search statistics I noticed something really curious: if you run a search on Google for “chris schwarz blog” my blog will show up in third place! The first and second being Chris’ won blogs.

Check this out:

The first widget adds the search box which you can place anywhere on all pages of your website while the second is for the results which you’ll add to a single page. It’s better to leave this one in a page on its own since it will take up considerable screen space.

Google offers two versions of the custom search, one that costs $100 per year and a free version where they’ll display some ads on your website.

While at it I also added a few AdSense banners, mostly because I’ve always felt a little curiosity about this advertisement medium and its effectiveness. Now I’ll be able to experience how effective it actually is.

To finish the tweaking session I also changed the blog RSS feed through FeedBurner so I can monitor its the usage statistics. I setup the server to redirect the visitors from the old feed url to the new one but please drop me a line if you stop getting my posts in your feed reader.