Redirect posts from a wordpress.com blog over to a self-hosted blog

[blacey]

Hi All

I started a wordpress.com blog with a few posts on it, and these have been shared using social media so links to these exist on Facebook and Twitter.

I've decided that its going to be better and more effective to have the blog on my primary domain.

How would I setup a redirect from the wordpress.com blog to my self hosted blog? Normally I'd write a .htaccess file but I'm unable to do that over at wordpress.com.

I can't even see an option to install plugins, otherwise I would have used the "Redirector" plugin.

[blacey]

This is why I mentioned it might be worth my while re-arranging paragraphs from the articles, maybe adding some relevant images and changing the content slightly to avoid any cross domain duplication problems.

I might go ahead and do as Highland is suggesting, I was hoping that wasn't the only way to do it.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Ben

No problem... thanks for clarifying.  Seems like the only way to do it and have anything "redirect" is to have some sort of intermediate step.

This is a little wild, but you could;

1. Create your middle blog with matching content
2. Redirect wordpress.com to the middle blog with matching URLs and content
3. Then cross domain rel=canonical the middle blog to the final destination with the same content.

Maybe that's worth a try, I don't see any dup penalties cause only the final site is being "credited" by you as the source, but you end up with a chain of redirects, which is not recommended, but Matt Cutts has said they can handle 2-3 most of the time.

-Dan

[Highland]

I wouldn't just drop the old site. it has SEO momentum and you want to capture as much of that momentum as you can before you drop it (otherwise you need to build it from scratch on your new site).

There's going to be penalties in doing it either way. You're going to have duplicate penalty until the old site gets de-indexed.

[blacey]

Thank you both for your replies.

Highland, I was hoping to eradicate the sitename.wordpress.com blog in the coming month. The blog in question only has 3 articles at the moment so I'm not sure if I should just move the articles to the self-hosted blog; amend the content slightly (so the article isn't the same as sitename.wordpress.com), delete the wordpress.com blog and let Google and other search engines re-index the page on my self-hosted blog... or would this cause more hassle and possible penalties?

Sorry Dan I probably should have said before that the domain I'm wanting to redirect to is an existing site with pages already setup etc. I don't have access to the DNS and I have to contact BT through their online form and wait 3 days for them to get back to me per DNS change request so that's not a viable option, but I appreciate the information provided, it was certainly worth a read.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Ben

Highland's response is definitely a good "poor man's" way, and there's nothing wrong with it at all.

WordPress now offers site redirects through the wordpress store - I believe it's like $12 a year.

There is also this domain mapping trick, which seems like it would still work, but they do say its a little complicated.

-Dan

[Highland]

Wordpress.com is a whole different beast from the Wordpress software. WP.com uses the WP software and shoves it into a shared hosting environment. So you can't do most things you can do elsewhere.

If you are using your own domain, just move your blog off WP.com and host it yourself. You can retain the same URL structure doing this.

If you're using myblog.wordpress.com, you're a LOT more limited. My suggestion would be to do a poor man's 301. Copy your content to the new blog, then gut the old URL and put a link to the new URL. This is not the preferred method but it lets you keep your traffic and still pass some SEO. Since it's not duplicate, it will eventually cause your new page to rise and the old to fade.