: Migrating from a wordpress.com to wordpress.org blog without harming SEO I've had a Wordpress.com weblog for 3 years. And its pages have a good pagerank and are shown in first search results

@Jessie594

If your wordpress.com blog uses a subdomain such as "example.wordpress.com"

You would need to:


Set up Google Webmaster tools for your wordpress.com blog (here's how).
Set up your new self-hosted WordPress blog to use exactly the same permalink structure as the wordpress.com blog (don't worry, we'll fix this in a minute!).
Export your content from the wordpress.com blog.
Import that content into the self-hosted blog.
Change the permalink settings on the self-hosted blog to your preferred format.
Purchase and activate the Site Redirect product from WordPress.com, which carries a small annual fee (see the product page here).
Add your new site URL to Google Webmater tools, then tell Google you've changed your site address with their Change of address tool.


Now, when a user visits youroldblog.wordpress.com/old/permalink/style, the Site Redirect product at wordpress.com will send them to yournewsite.com/old/permalink/style, and then your self-hosted WordPress blog will automatically rewrite that URL to yournewsite.com/NEW/permalink/style.

This works because you changed the permalinks after importing the content, and your self-hosted WordPress "remembers" the old URL style and automatically rewrites it if you change the permalink structure. This tip assumes that you haven't yet imported the content into your new site. (If you have, you could delete it, change the permalink structure to the WordPress.com style, then reimport it again, assuming your new site doesn't have traffic yet.)

This redirection setup, combined with the "Change of address" tip, should help to reduce negative effects caused by the move.

If your wordpress.com blog already has its own domain name like "example.com"

Then you can follow the above steps, but skip numbers 1, 6, and 7. You would then simply need to change the nameservers of your domain to point to your new self-hosted blog. If you purchased your domain at wordpress.com, here are the instructions to repoint the domain servers.

If you registered your domain through wordpress.com, you may also want to move your domain to another host (for example, to the company you're hosting your new blog with) so that you don't have to pay domain renewal fees to WordPress or manage the domain through their control panel in future.

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