Bought Domain name outside of WordPress – now Google ratings down?
-
Hello,
I’ve been looking through the forums trying to understand my issue, but I have to admit I am a total beginner and not very comfortable with technology or its lingo, so I’m afraid I need some specific help.
I started a blog in January – parisimperfect.wordpress.com.
Because I was having fun with it and actually getting more traffic than I expected so early, I decided it would look better if I had a site at simply parisimperfect.com.
I bought a domain name (through a provider called 1&1 Internet) which allowed me to buy the name I wanted and redirect it to the wordpress blog.
That all works fine, but I’ve noticed that I no longer show up in Google searches as well as I was before. If I’ve understood other questions in the forum correctly, that is because Google still thinks wordpress.com is my root URL so I either broke the links or it is now ignoring both addresses?
So basically I need to buy the domain mapping from WordPress to get my rankings back?
Is there any way to just go back to how things were before? If I had known I would cut off the momentum simply by buying a domain name and linking it to wordpress, I wouldn’t have done it! I don’t mind the address that much :)
I am glad that everything still “works” (I mean people can type in either the parisimperfect.com and the parisimperfect.wordpress.com address and find my blog. But it seems like I’ve broken something in regards to search results now and I’m not really sure what to do about it. Can I just go back to the initial scenario? (I know it’s not much to pay for the mapping, but it means I have to keep track of both my domain with the outside provider and what’s going on with WordPress, right? I like to keep things as simple as possible).
Thanks for any help in understanding how to proceed now.
P.S. I bought the name over 72 hours ago, so I don’t think a time issue has to do with anything. Thanks!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
-
Please read the first paragraphs in this post so I don’t have to type all this out again. > http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2008/06/26/how-and-why-to-get-your-own-domain/
-
So basically I need to buy the domain mapping from WordPress to get my rankings back?
(1) Domain mapping (302 temporary re-directs )insure that readers who click links are seamlessly directed from the root domain URLs to the new domain URLs. That’s all it does.
(2) Rankings and links earned by the root domain belong to the root domain (or sub-domain). They are gone and your new domain is starting from zero again.
(3) I have gone through this twice myself and this is why I encourage all bloggers to purchase a domain name from the get go. http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2010/01/08/bloggers-get-your-own-domain/
-
Hi. Thanks, timethief. I have seen your very helpful responses on other forum questions so thank you. I actually *had* seen that post where you encourage people to buy the domain name from the get go. But since I didn’t know to do that beforehand and it’s already too late, I was trying to understand what to do from here.
Since both my new domain name and my wordpress.com name are both functional (if you go to parisimperfect.com and parisimperfect.wordpress.com they both work), I’m just trying to understand the implications if I do and do not buy the mapping.
So if I don’t buy the mapping and both the parisimperfect.com and parisimperfect.wordpress.com ‘work” – what exactly is google looking at? Will this be considered like a duplicate since people can access the same content from two different addresses? (I’ve heard google doesn’t like this).
I have only been blogging since January so I guess it’s not that long to try to recoup. But it sounds like the mapping is critical to getting back to where I already was with the wordpress.com? I’m just sort of regretting buying the domain name after the fact as it seems confusing afterwards.
-
My advice is:
(1) purchase domain mapping;
(2) change the visibility of the root blog to “private” so there is no duplicate content issue.;
(3) accept the fact that no matter what point in time it was when you made the decision to have your own domain the result would be the same;
(4) take solace in the fact that as your root blog was a baby blog you have lost far, far less in terms of links and rankings than what we who had 2 year old blogs lost;
(5) work hard to keep your blog full of new and interesting content and within about 6 months the new blog will hopefully have earned enough links to have a Page Rank equivalent to what the root blog had;
(6) remind yourself what the benefits of having a blog on your own domain are. -
-
- The topic ‘Bought Domain name outside of WordPress – now Google ratings down?’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 