How to migrate social likes when moving blog domain?

[LauraHT]

Hi,

Our blog currently is hosted at wordpress.com and we are planning to move it under mysite.com/blog. I've noticed that at the moment in the existing individual articles there are social likes for the reader to likes/follow the page. And we do have some likes from these social buttons

e.g. in a particular article I receive 4 twitter likes/5 facebook likes from those social media buttons after the article body.

After moving the blog would the articles lose the social likes? How would I manage it not to? I know that there is a wordpress plugin available to purchase: http://store.wordpress.com/premium-upgrades/redirect/

If I purchase it would it resolve my problem? Please help

Thanks!

[MatthewBarby]

Hi Laura,

If you're looking for the the counter on your social media buttons to update to show the original number of social shares then it's not going to happen, I'm afraid.

When you move domain, all of the social media buttons will reset their counters and show '0' for all of your articles. Having said this, you need to make sure that you set up 301 redirects from all your old pages to the new ones. If you are just doing a straight domain swap (i.e. all the URLs will stay the same except for the domain name) then you can add the following code into your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymlinks 
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} \olddomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You will need to replace 'olddomain.com' with your old domain name and 'newdomain.com' with your new domain name. A word of warning here is that making changes to your .htaccess file (if you don't really know what your doing) can end badly, so make sure you pass it on to your developers - otherwise, you can use that plugin.

All of the SEO benefits that your previous pages have gained (links, social shares, etc) will be stransfered to the new domain, but your social shares counters won't be updated. I would recommend giving the following article a read before moving to a new domain:

http://www.webseoanalytics.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-change-your-domain-name-without-losing-your-rankings/

Hope this helps!

Matt