un-voyage-en-chine.com becomes voyage-chine.com!
It's big news for us, but also for you! If you've just landed on this page, you've probably noticed something has changed in your address bar...
It's big news for us, but also for you! If you've just landed on this page, you've probably noticed something has changed in your address bar....
After several weeks of negotiations, we managed to acquire the lovely domain name www.voyage-chine.com at a premium price (I'm barely exaggerating...). Gone is the lengthy URL full of hyphens—welcome to a more generic and especially more credible address for our business! If you know anything about the web industry, you're aware that the domain name market is saturated, and that in 99% of cases the best names have already been reserved for years...
This is particularly true in the travel sector, which is extremely competitive, so most bloggers and agencies have to adapt and find a brandable or original name, short of a generic one. That was our situation two and a half years ago when we created this site. All the domain names we had in mind were taken, and we decided in any case to add a determiner and hyphens to work around it: un-voyage-en-chine.com was born...
The problem with this workaround was that, beyond being cumbersome for visitors and tedious to type, it was poorly perceived by Google, which tends to penalize these lengthy domain names. This became even more true after their algorithm update last year on EMD (exact match domain).
Never mind the technical side! Just know that over the months it became clear to us that a change was necessary despite the risks involved. Fortunately, there are auction sites for purchasing interesting domain names. Some clever folks who recognized the potential of domain names early on reserved a bunch of them in the early days of the internet, and can afford to make a living from this type of activity today... A real business, I tell you! Imagine the person who had the brilliant idea to reserve poker.com or bank.com back in the 90s...
So here we are, owners of voyage-chine.com, just a few weeks after the site redesign that had turned your world upside down... Admit it looks much better, doesn't it? The transition went smoothly—you were probably sleeping peacefully at the time, anyway. In any case, if you type the old address www.un-voyage-en-chine.com, you'll be automatically redirected to the new one.
Isn't life beautiful? This 301 (permanent) redirect is also meant to transfer the popularity our site has built up so far, and we're hoping the search engines will take that into account quickly enough so we don't get penalized too much in search results...
As for the logo, you'll have noticed we chose to keep the en. Partly because it saves us work (though the time it took to write that sentence we could have changed it), but mainly because it looks more natural...
That's the news for now—a new adventure is beginning and thank you for being part of it! Happy browsing on www.voyage-chine.com
Frequently asked questions
The site un-voyage-en-chine.com became voyage-chine.com in September 2013 to adopt a shorter, more memorable domain name that is better perceived by search engines, particularly following Google algorithm updates on EMD (exact match domain).
Yes, a permanent 301 redirect has been set up. Any visit to the old address www.un-voyage-en-chine.com is automatically redirected to www.voyage-chine.com, with no action required on your part.
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect that tells search engines that a page has permanently moved to a new address. It transfers the popularity (incoming links, authority) accumulated by the old domain to the new one, thereby limiting SEO losses.
Any domain name change carries temporary risks for search rankings. The 301 redirect we implemented is designed to minimize these effects by transferring site authority to search engines, which typically process these changes within a few weeks to a few months.
