Is having "dot wordpress dot com" in your URL really better for your traffic?
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Chatting with a friend, I was told that having “dot wordpress dot com” in your URL is better for your traffic / SEO than using a custom domain. That is to say, for someone like me, using the URL “motoringconbrio.wordpress.com” would be preferable to using “motoringconbrio.com” (what I use now) in terms of traffic, SEO, search results, website rank, and so on.
Is he blowing smoke, or is this really true? And if it’s true, is there any way to quantify this? Will it increase my traffic / SEO by 10%? 20%? Etc.
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From personal experience, its about the same. I got a custom domain about two months ago. My traffic dropped for a little while, but then came back up to about where it was before. I did register my new URL through Google’s Webmaster Tools, but not sure if it helped or not.
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Your friend is right. It’s actually quite a powerful effect: a subdomain of a BIG domain always has more SEO than a single domain, even with the same amount of readers. I don’t recall the numbers he was talking about, but he wouldn’t have mentioned the effect if it were less than 10%.
In terms of gaining regular readers, a custom domain is better, because nobody will remember the .wordpress.com part of your URL. But in SEO terms the subdomain is better. It’s all a tradeoff.
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A custom domain name seems to have more “class” and is much easier to remember and looks cooler on a business card (even if it is a personal card) -the custom domain name tends to be shorter and easier to remember also which helps people when they want to pass on a site name to someone
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