Why do people follow and like my dead blog?
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I used to have a blog at lipglossandabackpack.wordpress.com.
Earlier this year I moved to self-hosting at lipglossandabackpack.com. I put a notice on the old site that it had moved, but didn’t “deactivate” it completely, mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to make my Gravatar link only to my new site, and I liked participating in events like the Weekly Photo Challenge. (Also, my new blog still shows a few images hosted on the old one, as when I exported the content a lot of the media failed to transfer over.)
I still seemed to be getting a lot of traffic to the old blog, so a few weeks ago I paid the $13 fee to have lipglossandabackpack.wordpress.com redirect to my new URL. Now, that link takes people directly to my self-hosted site.
However, I am still getting NEW subscribers on my old blog. I don’t understand how that is possible when the front page of the blog should redirect to the new site. How can I get people to stop subscribing to that blog and instead subscribe to my new blog?
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I just wanted to update because upon closer inspection I realized that people are not liking posts on my old blog, only following it. However, the following is a regular occurrence even after paying for the URL redirect.
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Have you gone through the process of porting your followers over to the new blog? Staff used to have to do it but now bloggers can do that themselves.
You might just have to do it again.
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Staff moved existing subscribers when I moved to self-hosting. I’m only worried about new followers.
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Is any support available for this topic? I just had another person subscribe to my dead blog and I have no idea how they accessed it!
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Web caches of lipglossandabackpack.wordpress.com are still very much available. I visited it with the search engine Startpage and the proxy service Ixquick Proxy. Although I was unable to subscribe, blocked by security safeguards implemented by Startpage/Ixquick Proxy, there may be other search engine/proxy services that aren’t so particular.
Caches will be available in Google search results for some time, and at archive sites such as Wayback Machine indefinitely.
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…there may be other search engine/proxy services that aren’t so particular.
I take that back. There shouldn’t be any way to subscribe to a deleted WordPress.com blog.
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The blog isn’t “deleted”, but I have paid $13 to have the .wordpress.com URL redirect to my primary site (.com). When I used Startpage it properly redirected me to the .com site?
The other thing is that I just can’t imagine that many people are using these bizarre ways to access my site AND to subscribe.
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I forgot the Google provides easy access to cached results as well. They’re hidden in a drop-down menu activate by a little arrow button in the search result.
Here’s a Google cache of the lipglossandabackpack.wordpress.com: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sgmwf6IxEC4J:lipglossandabackpack.wordpress.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a. If you click the back button, you’ll see the search that gave that result.
You don’t enter lipglossandabackpack.wordpress.com into the address bar (URL bar), because as you say that will redirect to the .com site. You enter it into the Google, Startpage, etc. search bar. At Startpage. this search gives a cached result that can be reached by selecting the separate “View by Ixquick Proxy” and “Highlight” links.
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Hi there,
It looks like you’ve done everything you should do to redirect visitors to the right place, and it’s surprising that so many people are ending up following your old blog. I’m investigating this and checking with our team about how this could be happening — don’t be surprised if I end up on your list of followers while I dig around and look into this. :)
I’ll let you know if I can find out more about what’s going on!
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I think I’ve sorted out the issue — if a WordPress.com user enters your domain lipglossandabackpack.com as a blog to follow in the WordPress.com Reader, they end up subscribed to the wrong blog. Our team knows about the issue but hasn’t been able to resolve it yet, so I’ve added the details about your site to their report. (The more reports we have about it, the more likely it is they’ll be able to find a solution.)
I don’t have an immediate solution for you, but we’ll let you know if our team is able to fix this up! In the meantime, anyone who subscribes via email directly on your site will be subscribed to the correct blog.
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