Own domain and SEO

[JJEENN]

Just curious to know...if we map our network to our own domain, how will the search engines treat that? Will they recognized our domain name for getting the traffic and containing the content or will ning.com be recognized?

For instance if we have a network about puppies. And we map it to www.puppies.com . When somone searches in Google for " Puppies network" will they potentially see our domain (www.puppies.com) listed or the puppies.ning.com url ?

(This question is being asked because I believe that you cannot host a Ning network on your own server. Correct?)

Thanks.

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi JJEENN,

Correct: you cannot host a Ning network on your own server. Once you have purchased the domain mapping premium service and have verified that it's working, we recommend making this change to auto-forward users to the mapped domain version of any page. Once Google and the other search engines pick up and process this change, your domain will become the one that results appear under in the search engines rather than the ning.com equivalent.

Thanks,
Phil

[JJEENN]

Thanks a bunch. That helps to clarify things for us!

[BP]

Phil,

A few questions:

1) Obtaining the source code allows me to modify the network per our needs correct?
2) Then, can I host the network elsewhere? If not, what if we become successful and want to sell our brand and network?
3) If we cannot sell the network, is the data portable to another network built from ground up? In other words, all the content that is on the xxxx.ning.com site could that be uploaded to our own in the future?

BP

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi BP,

You can obtain access to the PHP code behind your network and modify it to your needs; this means that you will no longer receive automatic updates when we roll them out. In order to host the PHP code elsewhere you would need to replicate the underlying Ning platform elsewhere; this would be much more work than just building the network from scratch so it's feasible but impractical. You can sell your brand and network as is (this has happened) and you're free to export your network's data and modify it so that it can run from a traditional relational database system on a different platform.

Thanks,
Phil

[BP]

Phil,

Just so that I understand it correctly, suppose we do build our brand while on your network and then ultimately have something else being built on the side. We would be easily be able to import all of the content that has been created on ning to our new platform? I do not see us doing this in the near future, but just want to know in case the need does arise for our own customized platform.

BP

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi BP,

You can certainly export all of your data from your Ning network. The ease with which you could import it into a parallel network would depend very much on how you built it. The data that you export from Ning will typically be in atom format, though you can also write custom PHP scripts to put the data into other formats. If your parallel network is using a relational database for storage then I would expect that you would need to massage the exported data somewhat since data in Ning's Content Store is non-relational.

Thanks,
Phil

[BP]

Thanks Phil, you are the man!

[Paul Annett]

When you say "this change" what do you mean - the link no longer takes me to a tutorial page since all your Ning permalinks changed.

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi Paul,

Here's the domain redirecting tutorial. If you're given the option, in most cases you should choose the www.mydomain.com version.

Thanks,
Phil

[momo]

We are considering creating a ning network and redirecting it to a subdirectory on our own domain. I looked at the domain redirecting tutorial. Very easy. What kind of redirect is this? I am hoping it is a 301 permanent instead of a 302.
thanks