Tips for moving from a free WordPress blog to your own domain
I have recently discontinued using my WordPress free hosting at WP.com and have a few notes that would help the next person make the move to their own hosted domain.
The first step I did was setup WP.com as a subdomain for my new domain.
e.g.
New Domain – JohnWilkerson.com
Existing WP Name – Wizmatic.Wordpress.com
New Sub domain blog.johnwilkerson.com
Why did I do this? When I setup the subdomain and paid the 12 bucks to WP to forward it I was originally going to run the blog under a sub domain off the primary domain. But after putting more thought into my files and domain structures I just did not want to give up the ranking benefits I get from the blog and not let the primary domain get those benefits.
What I did was wait about a month to make sure Google had indexed my old WP “Wizmatic” site and applied the new sub domain name to the file names. This now gave me control of the file name as related to my primary domain and gave me control of the content.
Next I installed WP.org onto my primary domain location and exported and then imported my original post from WP.com to the johnwilkerson.com location in my primary domain.
This created duplicate content from my WP.com location.
Next I went into my DNS manager and did a top level redirection for blog.johnwilkerson.com to johnwilkerson.com
This will take all my already existing content that has been indexed by Google from the WP.com site and redirects it to the primary johnwilkerson.com blog site. This worked because I waited until all the old content had been indexed under the subdomain name and because I did an export/import of the content without changing the files names link structure.
I suppose I could have skipped the subdomain process and just pointed the WP.com site to the johnwilkerson.com site and done the same thing but I had not originally planned to host the blog in the root directory.
My next step is to delete all the original content from the WP.com site and let the new johnwilkerson.com site take over.
I will also cancel the WP.com re-point to the blog.johnwilkerson.com subdirectory.
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John Wilkerson is a Marketing/Sales Professional specializing in online branding, ecommerce sites, blogging, email advertising, content creation, print media, and direct mail. Follow @johnwilkerson
863-398-2199
JDW.Wilkerson@Gmail.com
http://www.johnwilkerson.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/johndwilkerson
http://twitter.com/#!/johnwilkerson
Phone 863-398-2199