Moving to self-hosted
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I successfully moved the content of my WordPress blog into my self-hosted blog. I was under the impression that when I do that, the posts would no longer exist within the old blog. In fact, there are now 2 identical posts on both blogs. Is there any downside in letting the old blog stand as it is, without it being marked private? The names of the 2 blogs are totally different. I’m also concerned about Pinterest pins or Foodgawker links associated with the old blog if I decide to shut down the old blog, unless I pay for redirect service.
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Hello there,
There are some SEO (search engine optimisation) issues related to this.
This is called ‘duplicate content’, which it’s basically when an identical content appears on two different webpages/URLs.On one hand this confuses the search engines that can decide to not indexing one page instead of the other. For instance, if one of your content is published both on your wordpress.com and wordpress.org website, a search engine might decide to keep the first older content indexed on the search engine results page, basically not displaying your new self-hosted website on the results page.
Although it’s not an ideal situation, I personally don’t see it as a 100% serious issue, since you’re the author of both websites. It’s like your two websites are competing over the same keywords and queries to get found by people, if you know what I mean.
Setting your wordpress.com site as private will solve a few SEO issues, but it will make your Pinterest pins and other social media related results way too difficult to be found and shared, since their original URLs would not be visible to the public anymore.
Shutting down the wordpress.com website is even worse in my opinion, as it will create a series of broken pages that won’t lead your readers nowhere.
I’ve been in your same situation a couple of years ago, and what I did was to place a sticky post on my homepage saying that I’ve moved my website to another URL and that the blog would’ve stayed there as an archive, but never been updated.
Sorry for the long reply but I tried to be clear and comprehensive.
Feel free to ask some questions if you have any doubts :)
Cheers!
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No, thank YOU for the long and comprehensive response! I appreciate it as it’s all vey clear to me now. I think I’m going to take your suggestion and do the sticky post. I never really like it when I find something I like only to find out the site has been marked private, and like you said it’s even worse when you get one of those 404 not found errors. Eventually I hope, due to inactivity, the old blog will not come up on search as much. Thanks so much! You are awesome! 😃
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Thanks for the kudos @angiechristina, much appreciated :) :)
As for the inactivity of the blog: yes, it should eventually go slowly down as the search engines prefer fresher content to index on SERPs. However, since wordpress.com is really well search engine optimised, blogs and websites powered by its engine tend to stick a little bit more on SERPs.
I reckon that the winning key in these cases is to leverage that and use it in your advance. ;)
Cheers and best wishes with your new blog!
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