Any help on best practices to move blog domain?

[LauraHT]

Hi,

I am going to move my blog hosted on wordpress.com to a folder under mysite.com. (e.g. mysite.com/blog/). I start to think after the blog has gone live there will be duplicated content issue because I am going to import my posts in last 2 years onto the new location.

I what way can I avoid that happen? Can I set something up (e.g. 301 redirect) in my current wordpress.com account? Any advice.

Please help!

Thanks

[Modi]

Yes, if you change the path, then 301 redirect are the best way and indication to search engines that the blog path has changed. You may use a single liner code through htaccess to add blog in url

Check on Stackoverflow - if you need the code. There are possibly hundreds of questions like this been asked.

[Chris.Menke]

Laura,

Wordpress.com has a Offsite Redirect service that you can purchase for something like $12 per year, or something like that, and it provides a 301 redirect to your new site. If you purchase that service and upload your backup to your new domain, you'll be in good shape on the duplicate content issue.

If you just delete the old site and not pay for the redirect service, there will likely be overlap in Google's index of identical content from two different domains and unless you get a lot of good links going to your new site immediately, your old site would probably be recognized as the authoritative one for the first 4-6 months or so.