DId using existing URLs used to be free?
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I have used WordPress in the past for a school website, and I didn’t pay to have the URL we bought from 1and1.com ported over into WordPress.
However, I am building a new blog, and what I think i see is that they want you to pay now for something called Domain Mapping.
Am I confusing two different features? Or did they start charging for this since August 2011? I can’t seem to find the answer to this in the forum.
THanks!
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I have been here for 6 years and domain mapping has never been free of charge. If you have an existing domain then you can purchase a domain mapping upgrade from WordPress.com and map to it from a free hosted WordPress.com blog.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/
http://support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/map-existing-domain/The reason we purchase domain mapping is so that all the URLs from the .wordpress.com root blog when clicked seamlessly redirect to the same content in the post under the new domain URLs.
The pagerank and authority the blog earned was earned by the .wordpress.com URLs and belongs to them. It’s not transferable. so what that means is the domain starts from zero. In about 4 – 6 months time the content will all be re-indexed by search engines under the domain URLs and all things being equal the blog will probably have the same pagerank and authority it had prior to purchasing domain mapping. http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/register-domain/
If you do not renew your domain mapping then all those domain URL’s are broken and the blog reverts to the old .wordpress.com URLs. Then all those broken links are there for months until the search engines like Google index them again under the .wordpress.com URLs and clear their caches (3 – 6 months).
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Thanks for the extensive reply, Time Thief. :)
I know we didn’t pay for it in WordPress, because I would have had to get the school treasurer to give me her credit card, and I didn’t do that when I set it up. But we also had a .org.
I also recall there was an MX redirect thing I had to do. Is that why we didn’t have to pay?
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No. It sounds like someone from outside WP GAVE you the URL, but I don’t know how you could connect it with your WP.com blog without paying for the mapping. Someone must have donated that too. You used to be able to buy credits as gifts, so perhaps that’s what happened.
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No, the treasurer bought the url from 1and1.com and gave me access to that account. Nothing was donated for the URL, unfortunately. But I know we didn’t pay for using it in WP.
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Then what you are describing is beyond my and TT’s combined twelve years of experience here and we cannot help you.
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I am, of course, assuming the blog was previously hosted here. Because WP.com and WP.org work quite differently.
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Hmmm…I am pretty sure I started with WordPress.com, not WordPress.org. But if they offer free url porting then maybe it was? That school url had a .com and a .org attached to it. So maybe that had something to do with it. I honestly don’t know, I only know that I used a version of WP and I didn’t pay to port the TWO domains over, .com and .org. :)
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@tucsonhomesandschools
There is no way to WordPress.com provide you with domain mapping has never been free of charge. I provided the links you need to purchase domain mapping above when I first posted into this thread so I consider this issue to be resloved. Best wishes to you. -
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