I love wordpress, its a great product. I used it recently on a free subdomain of theirs and wrote a few posts. I wasn’t sure I was going to get into this blogging lark so thought it was a handy half way house. I didn’t want to go out and get a domain to put it on, upload the scripts and configure it unless I was really sure that I was going to get in to it.
10 days later I’m kinda hooked. I like spouting off and venting about stuff that pisses me off or interests me or just bemuses/amuses me.
So last night I bit the bullet. I exported all the old posts to the new WP setup here and went out and sourced the various plugins and themes I wanted to use.
I looked through the upgrade options in my robwatts.wordpress.com cp and didn’t see anything on redirection. Saw a little bit about url masking and all that, but nothing on what I wanted, which was a simple “301 this content has been moved permanantly” to where you are at now.
For the curious amongst you that would be
header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
header(”Location: http://www.mywebsite.com/”);
exit();
I mailed support too,only to be told that currently, its not a feature they offer or support. I can see why they’d be averse to their users having the capacity to do it themselves. Free wordpress subdomains don’t allow you to insert PHP or javascript.They’d hardly want loads of little spammers running around abusing the trust score of the parent domain for starters.
The odd thing is I would have quite happily have paid for this. I didn’t expect them to do it for nothing. It would have saved me from having to go back over everything ive written and close commenting and put up a link to the new location. I could just delete it too, alas the seo in me just cringes at the resultant loss of link love. Not to mention my huge army of feedburner subscribers, a whole 3 in number 
oh, and search engine visitors looking for Dirk fuckin Benedict!Mustn’t forget those eh.
I was surprised at the trust and authority conveyed to the wordpress.com domain. I doubt whether any of what I write here will rank for anything for some time. Its a brand new domain, has little to nothing link love too…but, we shall see, of course, I’m not exactly bothered.
If you really really liked this post you might even want to buy me a Stella Artois :D
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January 17th, 2007 at 3:05 pm[…] If you’ve ever launched a new website, especially since 2005, then you’ll know that it can take quite some time to be found for your target kw’s and phrases within the search engines.This is a little look at Google and how it treats new domains and how trust and authority are bestowed from parent domains to subdomains and how it can be an effective strategy in kick starting a new campaign, without excessive reliance on PPC campaigns. I launched a new subdomain on the 1st January 2007. It fitted in with one of my New years resolutions of blog regular. I wrote a few posts about various odds and sods as and when they occured to me. I gave them logical titles and didn’t give too much thought to any SEO’d page content and structure strategy. It was a Wordpress subdomain in the form of robwatts.wordpress.com. As I said previously I wasn’t sure I was going to get into this blogging lark so rather than go out and purchase domain, upload the scripts, create a database, configure it, start getting links etc, only to find after a week or so my interest had waned I decided to go with a free wordpress subdomain. Signed up, chose a theme and started to blog, easy peasy lovely jubbly. A few days later i found I was getting referals for various kw’s from Google. Wow, I thought, slick and quick. I was pretty surprised at the almost instant level of authority. Take the query pay to blog. The subdomain ranked virtually overnight, there it is right at the bottom, position number 10 in my abridged jpg. […]