Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Redirect posts from a wordpress.com blog over to a self-hosted blog
-
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.
-
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.
-
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;
- Create your middle blog with matching content
- Redirect wordpress.com to the middle blog with matching URLs and content
- 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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
301 redirects Ruby on Rails
Can anyone point me to the best way to implement 301 redirects on a Ruby on Rails website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Changing from .com to .com.au
Hi All, we are looking for some guidance please, if at all possible. We have .com domain (the domain is older than 10 years), we have been using it for 2 years. We also have .com.au version of the domain (the domain is 2 years old, pointing to the .com domain) and isn't being used. We are an Australian based company. Our question is, should we be using .com.au instead of .com and if so, how would you advise going about doing the change over without having huge SEO impact on our business (negatively). We are on the home page for most of the searches we have optimized for, but we are always below the .com.au's - which is why we are considering the possibility of the move? Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creativeground0 -
Multilingual Site and 301 redirection
Hey there awesome people of Moz I have this site that has many languages in it. The main language is English and my developer did the following www.example.com ( is the main site ) which redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en if your geo location is supported by our languages then you will automatically be redirected to whatever language you have in your country but does the first language with is english have to 301 redirect to www.example.com/en ? I thought that the right way is to just leave /en at the root file. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Switching from .co to com?
I have a site that does pretty well on a .co domain, but would like to switch to over .com (we own the .com already). If we were to transfer .com and 301 redirect all the .co pages over to their .com version, would we suffer at all? What would you guys recommend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StickyWebz0 -
.htaccess 301 Redirect Help! Specific Redirects and Blanket Rule
Hi there, I have the following domains: OLD DOMAIN: domain1.co.uk NEW DOMAIN: domain2.co.uk I need to create a .htaccess file that 301 redirects specific, individual pages on domain1.co.uk to domain2.co.uk I've searched for hours to try and find a solution, but I can't find anything that will do what I need. The pages on domain1.co.uk are all kinds of filenames and extensions, but they will be redirected to a Wordpress website that has a clean folder structure. Some example URL's to be redirected from the old website: http://www.domain1.co.uk/charitypage.php?charity=357 http://www.domain1.co.uk/adopt.php http://www.domain1.co.uk/register/?type=2 These will need to be redirected to the following URL types on the new domain: http://www.domain2.co.uk/charities/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/adopt/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/register/ I would also like a blanket/catch-all redirect from anything else on www.domain1.co.uk to the homepage of www.domain2.co.uk if there isn't a specific individual redirect in place. I'm literally tearing my hair out with this, so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0 -
OMG. RAND IS ATTACKED! (in a blog post)
I posted a link to Rand's recent Moz Blog in another forum. One of the users posted a link to this article as a counter point. Thoughts? [title edited by staff for clarity]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads2 -
Blog posts not showing in serps for exact match title search
hi- my first client ranks #1 for the exact phrase of each blog post title the 2nd client doesnt rank anywhere when i search for the exact post title 2nd client has robots.txt User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ezpro9
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/ so that shouldnt noindex any posts right? his site ranks for many kw's - but oddly none of his blog posts are anywhere to be found - i dont mean for a kw search - i mean for searching for the entire title he doesnt rank anywhere in first 5 pages for any of 6-7 posts i checked any idea what could cause this? thanks0 -
Login redirect 302
Ok - anyone knows what to do with the temporary redirect to the login page? In our e-commerce system we have a checkout page, which requires user to be logged in - if they are not, we redirect them to the login page using simple php header("Locaiton: url"). This however has been found as a Warning as it's a temporary redirect. I can't really put there permanent redirect for obvious reasons so if someone could give me some clue on this situation that would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coremediadesign0