Hello! I have been chewing on a rather interesting dilemma for the past couple days. I plan on moving a self-hosted WordPress blog over to wordpress.com.
So ok, what's the big deal? All I need to do is export the old blog, re-import it onto wp.com and reset the domain pointing. It really couldn't be easier - unless perhaps I could do it Neuromancer style with naught but my brain.
However, here is the dilemma - I have set up my permalinks to read only http://www.xxxx.com/%post%/ and I even have my categories appended to http://www.xxxx.com/key-word-grab/. This oviously conflicts with wp.com's plain-vanilla http://www.xxxx.com/year/month/date/%post%/.
Given this, if I do a simple blog-import/domain-switcharoo Google will probably hate my poor little site for a month or even (more likely) longer.
My current plan involves using Dean Lee's plugin (http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/) and resetting my permalink structure to wp.com's plain-vanilla format. I'll let this stew for a month or so then perform my import.
So does this sound like a good way to ease Google into a new permalink structure given my circumstance? And how long do I let my Lee-directed structure sit before moving to wp.com - one month or three? Is it even really necessary?
