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I run a blog under mywebsite.com/blog. This is a self-hosted Movable-type installation. Now I want to get rid of the blog installation and use a hosted (WordPress.com) solution instead.

The blog is only a minor part of my website, but before making this change I want to make sure that I don't lose SEO value. What is the best option to make this change?

Bonus question: how big is the SEO-impact of a subdirectory (mywebsite.com/news) to the PageRank of the main domain (mywebsite.com)?

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You will take a hit because things will no longer be associate with your domain but instead the wordpress.com domain.

I presume you say it is minor based on business needs of the website, but from an SEO point of view the blog of a website is normally one of the more major sections because it is the one getting updated with beefy content.

I think a better solution in this case (given what you have presented) might be to go for a self-hosted WordPress solution if you want to move away from MoveableType, I have never done this before but this guide seems considered.

Then depending on your setup you might have to play with .htaccess to keep Google happy with regards to changed URLs but by and large that would be you.

If you absolutely have to change your site to an outside hosted one, I would perhaps toy with the idea of first of all making your internal one a subdomain (blog.mywebsite.com) and making sure Google is seeing that OK, then when you do the switch to WordPress.com you can point the subdomain to it. There will still be some SEO hits no doubt, there will be slightly different content on all the pages and different links but they would be nowhere near as steep as if you just move mysite.com/blog to mysite.wordpress.com

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  • Thanks Toby - accepting this solution because of the hint to use a subdomain first which gives me more flexibility for the later changes.
    – j0nes
    Dec 5, 2011 at 14:21
  • No bother, glad I could be of help.
    – Toby
    Dec 5, 2011 at 16:10
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First take in mind that www.mydomain.com/blog is not a subdomain (blog.mydomain.com) but a subfolder and that pagerank is on page, not the whole website (more info here: What is PageRank and how do I get it? ).

If your blog has traffic, also if this is a minor part of the whole website, you'll lose users and usually this is not a good thing. Moreover making this change you'll lose some SEO benefits. This happens because the main purpose of a search engine is to index contents and usually the contents of a blog is updated more often than a website. Thus, unless you've a real good reason to make the move, I advice you to keep the blog where it is.

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Or, you can avoid any hit altogether if you create proper 301 redirects from your current URLs to the new URLs.

If your old URL is

site.com/yourBlog/articleName

and you create a 301 redirect on your site to

yourBlog.wordpress.com/articleName

there shouldn't be any hit at all to your SEO.

Update:

Thinking about this a little further, the others are correct that the SEO juice will no longer be associated with your current domain. But the SEO for those articles in particular will still be the same.

What you may be able to do is to get a custom domain for the Wordpress blog of

yourBlog.site.com

and while it will be hosted on Wordpress, as far as search engines are concerned it is on your domain.

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