Prioritizing New Domain vs. WordPress.com

  • I migrated my wordpress.com site (www.quietpilgrim.wordpress.com) to a self-hosted domain on Bluehost (www.quietpilgrim.com) about six months ago.

    I’ve followed lots of suggestions like adding my side index to Google, Bing, etc. but any time I search known content in Google, the links to my older wordpress.com site always appear first. It actually appears that my old wordpress.com site has better ranking in Google than my new self-hosted domain and I am puzzled by this.

    Does it makes sense to keep both sites active or should I hide my old site to only filter traffic to my new site?

    Would it help with indexing if my site was https vs. http? If so, is there an easy and free way to do this with my self-hosted blog. Is that necessary?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter bakerlance

    (@bakerlance)

    Also, since I have Jetpack connected to my new site and the old, I can’t tell how much of the traffic is from the wordpress.com site and how much is from the self-hosted domain. Any help would be much appreciated!

    Make your old website URL to 301 redirect to new website url using google webmaster tools. As the search engines detect the 301 redirect, they update their data to show the new URL instead of the old one. The time it takes to see this change in the SERPs depends on how frequently they spider your website and how quickly they can process the change.

    Thread Starter bakerlance

    (@bakerlance)

    Interesting! I think I understand what you are saying, but I can’t figure out how to do this since I cannot access the .htaccess file in my wordpress.com site. Am I understanding the process correctly?

    How do I actually set up the 301 redirects from https://www.quietpilgrim.wordpress.com to https://www.quietpilgrim.com?

    I see that once these redirects are in place I can submit a change of address in Google’s search console, but I’m not familiar with how to actually implement these 301 redirects. Any simple way to explain this? Much appreciated!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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