Can you use an external 301 redirect for a blog post hosted on wordpress.com?

Question

My friend has a WordPress blog and he wants to move some of the posts to another site. I suggested that he install a redirect plugin to do so.

He wrote back:

I think the plugin you offered works if you have your own site built using wordpress. My blog is on wordpress.com, not its own site. Thus I don’t think I am allowed to upload my own plugins.

Is it possible to redirect blog posts off of a blog hosted on wordpress.com? Either by installing a plugin or through built in functionality?

I found that they have functionality for redirecting the entire blog to a new site. They sell that for $13 per year. Given that they seem to want to make money on moving an existing site away, I fear they may not support redirecting individual posts.

Answer 1

There is no way to redirect an individual post on a wordpress.com site to an external site for the reason you mention. This is one of the (many) limitations on wordpress.com and it's worth it to really do the research before making a decision on whether to use .com or self-host WordPress on your own (not a dig at you, just putting this here for future readers).

What you can do is the ever-popular Poor Man's Redirect:

Gut the content on the page/post in wordpress.com and replace it with a link to the desired page.