Moving from wordpress.com to self-hosted wordpress blog

Question

Hello,

I have been writing articles on the wordpress.com blog, now i am looking to move it to self-hosted wordpress blog but i wonder:

1)

Should i move all my articles on the new blog or just put an article on my last blog that more articles will be posted on my new blog?

2)

If i move all articles on my new blog, i am not sure about how google will react to it because there are articles with good number of visitors, won't this be seo-un-friendly because i am not sure but google will re-create page reputation stuff, etc or those articles will have same popularity even if i move elsewhere?

3)

What are the implications and side-effects in moving from wordpress.com blog to self-hosted wordpress blog?

Thanks

Answer 1

For general instructions and hints, check out this in the WordPress forums:

• migration to wordpress.org self hosted & image exporting or uploading

Should i move all my articles on the new blog or just put an article on my last blog that more articles will be posted on my new blog?

I'd say take them all with you. That way, you'll have a rich archive from the start, plus all your articles have the same link structure and are on the same domain.

Google

You will most likely take a hit in SEO if you switch off your old blog, and re-create all content on the new one. For a personal blog, it might be not that much of a big deal, though. I would definitely not maintain the same content on both blogs, because Google might interpret that as duplicate content. If the hosted Wordpress blog allows it, maybe install a redirect to the new blog.

If you can set up the hosted WordPress to deliver a header redirect to the exact article on your new blog, it may even work without losing much in Google's ranking.

Answer 2

i migrated the end of 2007, and wrote a blogpost on what I did, but it's in Dutch i'm afraid. but here's a summary of what I did;

• moved my RSS-feed to feedburner a long time in advance and asked everyone to switch
• did an export of my old blog (i.e. articles + comments) and imported the result in my self-hosted wp.org-blog
• changed the number of posts/page to 1 on the old wp.com-blog
• removed all comments on the old blog
• for the 20 (or 50?) most popular blogpost removed most of the content, only leaving a teaser and linking to the full blogpost on the self-hosted blog
• removed (almost) all widgets and added an rss-widget with the feed from my new blog
• asked everyone who linked to the old blog to change the link
• posted a 'last blogpost' which includes the link to the new url and to the feed (again)

it still took some time for google to send traffic to the new blog, but you'll have to bite that bullet i'm afraid.