Minds of Madness

Minds of Madness had years of episodes and an audience that mostly arrives through Google. Other sites, directories, and listeners had been linking to its episode pages since 2022.

That history is what makes a move risky. Do it carelessly and the traffic never comes back. Every old episode link dies. The Google rankings built up over years reset. And the visitor history that would tell you what went wrong starts again from zero.

A custom site where the episode list comes straight from the podcast's own feed. Our site collects the feed and hands it to the listener. The usual shortcut leans on a free middleman service, and those keep shutting down without warning.

Every old episode address points at its new home, so a link posted years ago still lands on the right episode. We also carried the existing visitor tracking across instead of starting fresh. That is the only reason the before and after can be compared at all.

On top of the move: an interactive map of the cases, and a homepage that pulls in the newest episode by itself.

Traffic held steady straight through the move. The months after sit in line with the months before, and ahead of the same period a year earlier. For a move like this, no change is the win.

Google's first report after launch flagged twelve dead links. Exactly one was ours, and we fixed it the same day. The rest were bots hunting for WordPress files that no longer exist, and dead advertising links that predate our involvement.