Exported my wordpress.com blog to self-hosted, what happens to SEO?

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  howellb1 · Member · Mar 6, 2015 at 4:48 pm

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  Hello –
  I just exported all my posts from my many-years-old wordpress.com blog, and published them on a new self-hosted wordpress blog on a new domain.

  I was considering leaving the wordpress.com blog up, in case anyone has bookmarked links or something – but now I’m wondering if having both the self-hosted and wp.com blog live at the same time will cause conflict or duplicates in SEO/search results.

  I guess the first part of my question is – if I leave the old blog up, will my posts show up in search results twice (once for the wp.com and once for self-hosted?)

  And the second part is if I take the old blog down, will I disappear from search results and need to ‘work my way back up’ the rankings with the new self-hosted version?

  Any thoughts/suggestions appreciated!
  Thanks

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  briansteeleca · Member · Mar 8, 2015 at 11:30 pm

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  I figured WordPress.com must have a solution, and indeed they do: Site Redirect.

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  timethief · Member · Mar 8, 2015 at 11:47 pm

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  If you purchase a site redirect upgrade in about 3 months time the search engines like Google will have re-indexed your content and the former authority and pagerank may be restored. Note that having a blog hosted by WordPress.COM provides a BIG SEO benefit that will not longer apply to your site so if search positioning ranking drops then do not be surprised.

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  timethief · Member · Mar 8, 2015 at 11:50 pm

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  Please provide the URL for the blog in question in the form of an active link starting with http://

  Yes, of course, it does. See here for what Google thinks of deliberately duplicating content across domains https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

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  howellb1 · Member · Mar 9, 2015 at 12:07 pm

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  Thanks for the advice – but I’m still not clear on what Site Redirect does to impact search results.

  Does Site Redirect leave the old posts up (where Google will find and index them) or does it remove all old posts and direct traffic to the new blog?

  And as far as ‘deliberately duplicating content across domains’, that is not my intention. I’m trying to avoid doing exactly that.

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  briansteeleca · Member · Mar 9, 2015 at 2:10 pm

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  As I understand it, the old posts are no publicly visible so that your content is not duplicated. If someone makes a request to your old domain, it redirects the visitor to your new domain.

  Likewise, if a search engine attempts to crawl your old site, Site Redirect will tell it that the site has been permanently moved to the new domain. That’s called a 301 redirect:

  Search engine-friendly “301” redirection will keep your search ranking solid.

  Here’s some more information on Site Redirect.

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  briansteeleca · Member · Mar 9, 2015 at 2:11 pm

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  That should read, no longer publicly visible.