What happens if you change your blog's name?

  • Unknown's avatar
    thegbox · Member ·

    Hey everyone! I need some help here. I am not liking my blog’s name lately and I am thinking of changing it. I am not starting a whole new blog, I am just going to the “username” part of my settings and I am changing it to something else.

    I believe this will also change my url – this is where I am a bit worried. Does this mean people will no longer be able to find me and all my traffic will be gone? I know I would have to update links and stuff, but, should I buy a re-directing option? or how does this work. I am just worried that I’ll change the name of it and I’ll have to start from scratch (with google, yahoo and other search engines that already kind of like me)

    Thanks for your help!!

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

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    If you go here > Settings > General you can change the Blog Title ie. the name without affecting the URL.

    If you change the URL then the consequence is broken links. Every link to the post and/or page at the original URL will produce a “404” page not found. So if your content has been indexed by search engines then anyone using them to locate links to the original URL will be out of luck as they will not connect to the content. Moreover, it will take 3 – 6 months for Google to clear their cache of those originally indexed links and to re-index your content. Changing a URL not a decision to take lightly. I avoid creating any “404s” at all.

  • Unknown's avatar
    raincoaster · Member ·

    If you want to change your blog’s main URL, like from whatever.wordpress.com to whatever.com, you can do that without broken links by getting the Domain Mapping Upgrade and the Domain Upgrade. So you buy the name, then apply it to your blog, and all you old links still work.

    In my experience, your traffic won’t drop but your pagerank will, and it’ll take 4-6 months to return. That’s not so bad. I whined about it at first but I’ve come to realize I was being silly. Do it.

  • Unknown's avatar
    thegbox · Member ·

    Thanks so much for your reply! So , right now my name is thegbox.wordpress.com which kind of sounds like a g string and an xbox, (I know) so, I will buy whatever.com (name still to be picked) and then buy those upgrades. Oh man, this is scary stuff. To have a name forever!

    Thanks again!

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    You’re welcome from me. If you do decide to purchase a domain and domain mapping upgrade then see here > http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/ and here > http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/map-existing-domain/

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