SEO for WordPress.com sites

  • Unknown's avatar
    leothehorse · Member ·

    Hi everyone,

    I’m looking to start a new blog, but I’m completely new it to. My plan is to launch the bog on “wordpress.com” since it is free and less risky for me. I know “wordpress.org” is the recommended platform for successful blogs, and so I plan to migrate there if everything goes well.

    My main concern however is regarding SEO. If my site content launches under a WordPress domain name before I switch it to a new one, will that hurt the SEO from the get-go?

    Thanks in advance!

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

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    I know “wordpress.org” is the recommended platform for successful blogs, and so I plan to migrate there if everything goes well.

    WordPress.org is not a platform. That is the website where the WordPress community makes the open source WordPress software. That software has to be installed at a hosting provider.

    WordPress.com is one such hosting provider, and all sites with us already use that software, with a few modifications. One of those modifications is that your site comes already set up for SEO – the open source version of WordPress include no SEO features at all, so you’ll need to use additional plugins to add that functionality. Most good SEO plugins are premium, i.e. you need to pay for them over and above what you pay for hosting.

    https://wordpress.com/support/seo/

    Whether WordPress.com or the open source version of WordPress software is best for you depends on your specific needs, but neither is necessarily better than the other, and using the open source version definitely isn’t a prerequisite for a successful blog – we have blogs on WordPress.com that get in excess of a million views a day, and that earn thousands of dollars in advertising revenue a month, so it would be safe to call those extremely successful.

    Success in a blog ultimately depends on the quality of your content and how well you market yourself, much more than what platform you’re using :)

    For a comparison of the features we offer on WordPress.com vs what you’ll get if you host the open source version of WordPress, you can see this link:

    https://wordpress.com/support/com-vs-org/

    If my site content launches under a WordPress domain name before I switch it to a new one, will that hurt the SEO from the get-go?

    If your site is public for some time under the free example.wordpress.com address, it will be indexed by search engines at that address. If you then add a custom domain, or move the site somewhere else under a new domain, search engines will need to re-index the content at the new domain. This usually takes a few weeks, during which you’ll see a drop in search engine traffic, but that should return to normal once the re-indexing completes. This is true for any domain change on any site, regardless of where it’s hosted or what platform you’re using.

    You can also prevent this by verifying your site with Google Search Console. Then when you change the domain, you can use that tool to notify Google of the address change so the re-indexing happens much faster. Verification with Search Console is built into all sites on WordPress.com, unlike the open source WordPress software where you’ll need to modify your site’s code or your domain’s DNS to verify your site:

    https://wordpress.com/support/webmaster-tools/

  • Unknown's avatar
    leothehorse · Member ·

    Hi Kokkieh,

    Thanks so much for this detailed info. I’m going to keep this on hand for future reference. You’ve answered all my questions and given me some good direction.

    Thanks again for all of your help!

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