Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Redirect posts from a wordpress.com blog over to a self-hosted blog
-
Hi All
I started a wordpress.com blog with a few posts on it, and these have been shared using social media so links to these exist on Facebook and Twitter.
I've decided that its going to be better and more effective to have the blog on my primary domain.
How would I setup a redirect from the wordpress.com blog to my self hosted blog? Normally I'd write a .htaccess file but I'm unable to do that over at wordpress.com.
I can't even see an option to install plugins, otherwise I would have used the "Redirector" plugin.
-
This is why I mentioned it might be worth my while re-arranging paragraphs from the articles, maybe adding some relevant images and changing the content slightly to avoid any cross domain duplication problems.
I might go ahead and do as Highland is suggesting, I was hoping that wasn't the only way to do it.
-
Hi Ben
No problem... thanks for clarifying. Seems like the only way to do it and have anything "redirect" is to have some sort of intermediate step.
This is a little wild, but you could;
- Create your middle blog with matching content
- Redirect wordpress.com to the middle blog with matching URLs and content
- Then cross domain rel=canonical the middle blog to the final destination with the same content.
Maybe that's worth a try, I don't see any dup penalties cause only the final site is being "credited" by you as the source, but you end up with a chain of redirects, which is not recommended, but Matt Cutts has said they can handle 2-3 most of the time.
-Dan
-
I wouldn't just drop the old site. it has SEO momentum and you want to capture as much of that momentum as you can before you drop it (otherwise you need to build it from scratch on your new site).
There's going to be penalties in doing it either way. You're going to have duplicate penalty until the old site gets de-indexed.
-
Thank you both for your replies.
Highland, I was hoping to eradicate the sitename.wordpress.com blog in the coming month. The blog in question only has 3 articles at the moment so I'm not sure if I should just move the articles to the self-hosted blog; amend the content slightly (so the article isn't the same as sitename.wordpress.com), delete the wordpress.com blog and let Google and other search engines re-index the page on my self-hosted blog... or would this cause more hassle and possible penalties?
Sorry Dan I probably should have said before that the domain I'm wanting to redirect to is an existing site with pages already setup etc. I don't have access to the DNS and I have to contact BT through their online form and wait 3 days for them to get back to me per DNS change request so that's not a viable option, but I appreciate the information provided, it was certainly worth a read.
-
Hi Ben
Highland's response is definitely a good "poor man's" way, and there's nothing wrong with it at all.
WordPress now offers site redirects through the wordpress store - I believe it's like $12 a year.
There is also this domain mapping trick, which seems like it would still work, but they do say its a little complicated.
-Dan
-
Wordpress.com is a whole different beast from the Wordpress software. WP.com uses the WP software and shoves it into a shared hosting environment. So you can't do most things you can do elsewhere.
If you are using your own domain, just move your blog off WP.com and host it yourself. You can retain the same URL structure doing this.
If you're using myblog.wordpress.com, you're a LOT more limited. My suggestion would be to do a poor man's 301. Copy your content to the new blog, then gut the old URL and put a link to the new URL. This is not the preferred method but it lets you keep your traffic and still pass some SEO. Since it's not duplicate, it will eventually cause your new page to rise and the old to fade.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redirect wordpress from /%post_id%/%postname%/ to /blog/%postname%/
Hi what is the code to redirect wordpress blog from site.com/%post_id%/%postname%/ to site.com/blog/%postname%/ We are moving the site to a new server and new url structure. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Changing from .com to .com.au
Hi All, we are looking for some guidance please, if at all possible. We have .com domain (the domain is older than 10 years), we have been using it for 2 years. We also have .com.au version of the domain (the domain is 2 years old, pointing to the .com domain) and isn't being used. We are an Australian based company. Our question is, should we be using .com.au instead of .com and if so, how would you advise going about doing the change over without having huge SEO impact on our business (negatively). We are on the home page for most of the searches we have optimized for, but we are always below the .com.au's - which is why we are considering the possibility of the move? Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creativeground0 -
Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects
Howdy Moz, We've recently bought a new domain and we're looking to change over to it. We're also wanting to change our permalink structure. Right now, it's a WordPress site that uses the post date in the URL. As an example: http://blog.mydomain.com/2015/01/09/my-blog-post/ We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to: http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/ Would this be an appropriate solution? RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanOBrien0 -
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
If I own a .com url and also have the same url with .net, .info, .org, will I want to point them to the .com IP address?
I have a domain, for example, mydomain.com and I purchased mydomain.net, mydomain.info, and mydomain.org. Should I point the host @ to the IP where the .com is hosted in wpengine? I am not doing anything with the .org, .info, .net domains. I simply purchased them to prevent competitors from buying the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlittman0 -
Dummy links in posts
Hi, Dummy links in posts. We use 100's of sample/example lnks as below http://<domain name></domain name> http://localhost http://192.168.1.1 http:/some site name as example which is not available/sample.html many more is there any tag we can use to show its a sample and not a link and while we scan pages to find broken links they are skipped and not reported as 404 etc? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
301 Redirect With A Message And Delay
Hello, I'd like to sell a site I own. I'd like the site to be redirected to the buyers site with a 301 redirect. But I'd like the viewer to be informed that the site was purchased by this company and they will be redirect in 5 seconds.I'd like for the redirect to be a complete 301 and pass as much linklove as possible. Are you familiar with how to do this? Thanks, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0