Moving without losing traffic

seremm · Member · Feb 7, 2011 at 1:30 pm
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I’m considering switching to a wordpress blog in my own webspace, but i currently receive a lot of wordpress.com traffic and i’ve been featured once or twice in the food section; is there any way not to lose all of this?

Sorry if the question is trivial or already answered and I couldn’t find it!

Serena

The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
timethief · Member · Feb 7, 2011 at 5:41 pm
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Provided you purchase domain mapping all the URLs from the wordpress.com root blog will seamlessly transfer your traffic to your new domain when the old URL links are clicked. If you do not purchase doamain mapping all those root blog links will produce a “404” page not found when readers click them. http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/

You will proabably retain most of your traffic but perhaps not all as some is coming from the wordpress.com global tag pages and from being featured as you have mentioned above. When you move the blog content into to a self hosted wordpress. org install it is no longer part of the wordpress.com community. Those links currently displayed on the wordpress.com global tag pages will be gone. Once the content is moved the blog on the new domain will not be qualified to be considered for featuring by wordpress.COM or in Freshly Pressed or in Blogs of the Day, Posts of the Day etc. beacuse those opportunities are only for those with wordpress.com free hosted blogs. Self hosted wordpress.org installs are stand alone islands. they are not part of the wordpress.com community.

It’s also important to understand that when you move a blog the page rank and authority achieved is NOT transferable. The authority and page rank your blog achieved with Google and other search engines, the authority it achieved with Technorati and the ranking achieve there belong to the root blog URLs. Your new domain will start from ZERO and it will take usually take about 6 months or longer for it to earn authority and ranking.
http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2010/11/06/setting-up-a-self-hosted-wordpress-org-install/
raincoaster · Member · Feb 7, 2011 at 9:10 pm
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Well, your hits will drop and there is NO way to avoid this. The SEO of a WordPress.com blog is higher, simply because there are so many more Wp.com blogs. You’re part of a 30-million blog domain here, whereas with independent hosting, you’re part of a network of … one.

I went from an average of about 1100 hits per day to an average of 250 when I moved, and I was doing everything right.
timethief · Member · Feb 7, 2011 at 10:02 pm
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I ahd a similar experience with my personal blog which is being domain mapped. In fact I’m currently thinking of moving it back to free hosting here at wordpress.com in order to increase traffic to it.
cathyscholl · Member · Feb 7, 2011 at 10:58 pm
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Interesting!
Glad I saw this.
Thanks.
raincoaster · Member · Feb 7, 2011 at 11:01 pm
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Not to toot our own horns, but TT and I are highly experienced at this. If we can’t figure out how to move without losing 90% of our traffic, it cannot be done.

I would move back in a heartbeat; in fact, I never would have moved, except I’m going to put advertising on that blog and the AdControl upgrade just isn’t enough for me. Mind you, 50% of ten times as many is a much bigger absolute $ number, now that I think of it.

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