Mobility becomes MobilityArena

Posted by Felix Okoli on Tuesday January 13, 2015 at 8:52:30:

I just noticed that a popular Nigerian mobile phone blog formally located at Mobility.ng has moved to Mobilityarena.com. There has not been any official blog post about the move or why it happened but it goes to show that Nigerian bloggers at times do see the need to move their blog from one domain to another and there could be a couple of reasons for that.

Why did Mobility move to mobilityarena.com? Well, I'm not sure but one thing that first came to mind was the fact that a .ng domain probably costs more than a .com. Yes, it costs about N15,000 a year to keep a .ng domain while a .com costs less than N2,000 a year. A second thought I had was that it might be because the owner intends selling the blog on blog flipping sites to foreign buyers in the short term and so having it on a .ng domain may make it look like a local blog. A third reason might be because the dot ng domain may not be ranking well in search engines as much as a dot com domain and since mobility.com was already purchased, he decided to buy mobilityarena.com.

Mister Mobility is not the first Nigerian blogger that has moved his blog's domain before as there are others who've done it in the past such as doncaprio.com(now geek.ng), youngprepro.com(now writersincharge.com), loyokezie.com(now loy.com.ng), otekbits.com(now bits.ng) and misspetitenigeria.blogspot.com(now misspetitenigeriablog.com).

One thing that Nigerian bloggers and website owners need to do when moving to a new domain is to at least ensure that the old domain is redirected to the new one for up a 6 months or a year so that it doesn't lose search engine traffic.

Why do Nigerian website owners move their domain in the first place? Are there any benefits of moving from one domain to another?

Well, one benefit is that it can increase their search engine traffic assuming they chose a new domain name that matches a popular keyword. Let's say for instance that a blog is mostly about shoes or phones and the old domain name is just random and has not identifiable keyword, moving to a new domain name that has something like shoes or phones in it can give it an edge in search engine results.

Some bloggers decide to stay local by using a local domain name extension such as a .ng while some prefer to be seen as an international blog by going for a .com. I think it mostly depends on what type of content your blog already has and what type of audience you are serving. Both type of domain name extensions are ok but it depends on which geographical area you want to focus on.

It's also good to chose a domain name that can easily be remembered by people and that makes good meaning rather than just a random or meaningless one.

It's also advisable as a blogger to at least make one or 2 blog posts notifying your readers about the move and why you moved to a new domain name so that your readers might be informed and also see reason to stay loyal to you.