I have recently changed my wordpress.com blog for a wordpress.org blog. I imported everything over, including the name and look.


Now I find out I cannot do a 301 redirect from the old wordpress.com blog to the new one so I left a farewell post giving the new blog url.


Should I leave the same articles on the new blog that are on the old one? What would the search engines think of that?


Should I put a link to both blogs on my website to get credit for the ranking and following the old blog already created?


What to do - what to do?


Thanks in advance for all advice,
kyh

Here's a post the runs through the process of moving from wp.com to self-hosted and redirecting the URLs.

How to redirect wordpress.com blog to self hosted domain

You'll have to spend $10/year for an upgraded account to keep the redirection going.

Originally Posted by vangogh

Here's a post the runs through the process of moving from wp.com to self-hosted and redirecting the URLs.

How to redirect wordpress.com blog to self hosted domain

You'll have to spend $10/year for an upgraded account to keep the redirection going.

Here is the official version of the above posted solution: http://en.support.wordpress.com/doma...ing-your-blog/ Although I'm not sure of how SEO friendly that solution is. Playing tricks with DNS name servers to get the old wordpress.com blog to resolve to the new domain "may" not be a real SEO solution.

I am not saying it is not a redirect solution as I have never tried this myself. But if I request the person's old URL at theirsite.wordpress.com and the wordpress.com server does not return a 301 HTTP status then this method does not work from an SEO perspective. It may get the USER to the right site but would not transfer credit for all inbound links to the old domain to the new one.

If however the wordpress.com server does return a 301 then the above solution would be effective, although I'm guessing if the new blog has different URL paths (different in any way other than the domain) then it would not work. They are not going to give you access to .htaccess so that you can create page-by-page redirects from old URLs to new URLs.

This is why I always tell people, if you think you may one day want to make anything "real" from your web site then pay for hosting. If you can't afford $5-10/month then you are not too serious about your blog. WordPress.com and Blogspot are great for personal blogs to keep in touch with relatives, etc. But anything you do there should be "throw away".

Thanks for posting the official link. Better to go to the source.

This is why I always tell people, if you think you may one day want to make anything "real" from your web site then pay for hosting. If you can't afford $5-10/month then you are not too serious about your blog. WordPress.com and Blogspot are great for personal blogs to keep in touch with relatives, etc. But anything you do there should be "throw away".

I completely agree and advise the same all the time.