Upgrading to a dot com (for dummies)
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Hello,
I am interested in upgrading my wordpress.com blog from one where the address reads http://metalstate.wordpress.com/ to http://metalstate.com so we are taken a bit more seriously. I have some questions on this process, and when it comes to different terminology I have a bit of difficulty understanding things, hence why I didn’t find many answers in the forum search.
Since I am happy with the theme of the blog and how I have set it up I don’t want that to change in any way. Will upgrading to a .com effect that?
I like using the browser editor to write posts, if I go to .com will I have to manage how I write posts differently?
Will people still be able to click on one of the many links we have scattered around the internet and still find our blog?
Will I lose any of my content?
More or less, I want WordPress to work exactly as it does now, is that possible?
What exact upgrade do I need to purchase to get the results I desire?I know I’m probably not the first to ask this, but I can’t seem to find simple answers. If you would be so cool as to help out it is greatly appriciated.
Thank You, Peace Love and Metal,
MattThe blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Purchasing an domain mapping upgrade will have no effect on your theme. The primary reason we purchase a domain is so the fact our blogs are being free hosted vy WordPress.com is obscured. The seconary reason we purchase domain mapping is so that all the URLs from the .wordpress.com root blog no matter where they are located on the internet when clicked will seamlessly redirect to the same content in the posts 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/
Important note: If you do not renew your domain mapping before it expires every year then all those domain URLs are broken links ie. when clicked they produce 404 (page not found) and the blog reverts to the old .wordpress.com URLs. All those broken links are in the SERPs (search engine page reaults) and all over the interent 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 that – good to hear that the blog reverts back to .wordpress.com when the we don’t renew the .com website, so we don’t lose all of our content!
Cheers
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No you don’t lose content but every link to that content is broken, so when anyone clicks the links they get a 404 (page not found error) message for months, until Google and the other search engines index it all again.
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The content is in the WP database, and stays there regardless of the domain status. Expired domains just mean that those ways to get to the data just don’t reach the WP servers. Google, Bing, Baidu, and other search engines eventually figure that out. For new content (e.g. a newly mapped domain), the search engines are actually rather fast and I think the 4-6 month time frame is particularly long. I’d say 30 days is more likely, though it varies. A while back, I set up a web site with over 22,000 pages, and Google had crawled nearly all of it in 4 days (as seen in server logs) and had it indexed in a couple more days. Baidu did it in half the time (but I didn’t check the indexing).
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