WordPress.com

1. neplusultra
   Member
   Feb 22, 2008, 4:53 AM

   Hey all,

   A quick question that I think might have a quick answer.

   I have been using wordpress.com to host my blog for over a year. I've recently moved it to its own server using wordpress.org free software.

   Is there ANY way at all to redirect all my traffic from my free .com blog to my own self-hosted blog -- given that I can't access .htaccess or even my index page to do a redirect tag?

   Any insight, even a simple "no", would be appreciated...although I'll be sad to hear confirmation of what I already suspect.

   30+
   realitymethod.wordpress.com

2. ellaella
   Member
   Feb 22, 2008, 5:31 AM

   If everything has been moved successfully to your self-hosted blog, you can make a final post on your wordpress.com blog providing a link to the other -- and deleting the other .com posts so search engines don't penalize you for duplicate content.

   There's no automatic redirect, if that's what you're hoping for.

3. neplusultra
   Member
   Feb 22, 2008, 5:41 AM

   Thanks! That was very helpful.

   What if people have linked to specific posts (http://mysite.wordpress.com/blah/blah/blah) -- if I do as you've suggested, they won't be redirected to the main page, will they, but instead just get a 404?

4. ellaella
   Member
   Feb 22, 2008, 5:50 AM

   You're welcome. Unfortunately, you're right about the 404.

   You can notify those bloggers and ask them to edit their links. In the meantime, you can make all but the most recent post (the redirect one) private, although if this will be a short-term situation and you're not losing sleep about Google, you can notify them and wait a week or two before deleting/closing off the rest of the blog. In the long run, both your blogs will be penalized for duplicate content.

5. tisme
   Member
   Feb 22, 2008, 4:58 PM

   neplusultra, while, for the apparent reasons, there's no an official and hence *supported* way to redirect your entire blog hosted on wp.com, it could be done quite transparently without losing any links you might have.

   however, this method will only work provided by and as long as you pay the $10/yr for the "custom domain" premium feature.

   basically, all you need is:
   1. to change your NS pointing back to your new domain once .com one gets redirected -- one guy even came up with a step-by-step tutorial.

   2. and install a relevant plugin to maintain your permalink structure.

   .
   what really makes me wander is, whereas this question pops up here so often that it could be quite legitimately qualified as a very FAQ one, still there's no any info regarding this issue on the FAQ blog itself.

   which makes all the folks who would like to move their blogs from .com ending up here, in these fora, just to get not exactly useful replies suggesting them to either put up a “I have moved” post (which is so '96/Web 1.0 nowadays) or even to ask someone getting bothered with editing their links (I can't even really stress here how much this latter one is such a straight... well, you know).

6. thesacredpath
   Staff
   Feb 22, 2008, 5:29 PM

   This is the FAQ on redirecting a .com blog: http://faq.wordpress.com/2007/09/09/can-i-redirect-my-blog/

7. tisme
   Member
   Feb 22, 2008, 5:47 PM

   that's right.

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