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301 redirect to my self-hosted wordpress.org blog not working properly

  1. cognitionetc
    Member

    So I paid for the site redirect upgrade to redirect my old blog cognitionetc.wordpress.com to my new wordpress.org site, cognitionetc.com. The actual redirect works fine, i.e. going to any place on my wordpress.com blog redirects to my new site. The problem I'm having is that I've apparently lost all my search engine ranking stats. My pagerank has gone from 3 to 0 and my page authority has gone from 32 to 1. I measured this using Open Site Explorer: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org. This looks to me like the redirect isn't a 301 redirect, which I thought I was paying for. I've messaged wordpress.com support but no one's responded to me. Not happy about this at all.

    The blog I need help with is www.cognitionetc.com.

  2. justjennifer
    Member

    I've tagged this for Staff assistance. Please be patient while they get back to you.

    Here's the announcement about the upgrade, which seems to indicate that it is a 301 redirect. http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/offsite-redirect/

  3. cognitionetc
    Member

    Hi, thanks. Yeah, I've seen several official posts stating it is a 301 redirect, which I why I paid for it. As you can see though, the essential search ranking stats just haven't transferred over. It could just be an error in this particular case which wordpress need to sort out.

  4. macmanx
    Happiness Engineer

    It is a 301 redirect, and it is working properly.

    Everything is as it should be on this end, but we unfortunately have no control over how Google chooses to operate their index.

  5. justjennifer
    Member

    @macmanx, as per Jane's announcement

    Purchasing the Offsite Redirect upgrade will take the traffic coming to your old wordpress.com blog and forward it to your new domain so that links to your old content won’t break and you won’t take an SEO hit as a result of your move.

    contradicts that and I'm not sure that SEOmoz is Google specific.

    Regardless, @cognitionetc-did you keep the same link structure as before? That can have an influence.

  6. kingryanarthur
    Member

    This topic is also of interest to me. So, if I understand things correctly, I have to pay $12 ongoing to maintain a redirect from my old wordpress.com pages to my self hosted version. That has got to be one of the only scenarios where I get free service with a company and then have to pay to do business elsewhere. Smart WP. Smart. And $12 is more than a domain name.

    So, just so I "get it", when I put that redirect in place it's from specific blog post to its corresponding counterpart on the new blog? How does it map it if the titles change? i.e. My post URIs were very long on WP.com and my new selfhosted blog shortened the slug so it's not a direct crossover? I have a blog who's wp.com redirects go to many 404s.

    And on the matter of checking to see if the "juice" passed though, I think that you'd need to wait a while to determine what Google thinks about the switch, they have to crawl all the old pages again in order to for the transfer of juice to be complete.

  7. timethief
    Member

    It's my experience that it will take about 3 - 4 months time for the reindexing to happen. When it does the site will have the same page rank and authority that was previously evidenced.

  8. raincoaster
    Member

    You only need the redirect if you didn't use a custom domain while on WordPress.com. If you used one, all you need to do is change the nameservers, which is presumably at no cost. That's one reason we always recommend the custom domain from the start.

  9. justjennifer
    Member

    How does it map it if the titles change? i.e. My post URIs were very long on WP.com and my new selfhosted blog shortened the slug so it's not a direct crossover?

    If you look at the support doc for the site redirect, it does specifically say that

    Note: The site redirect upgrade will not work for URLs that do not have the same permalink structure as your posts on WordPress.com.

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