Should I remove a Tumblr blog that I moved to my own server?

Question

This is relate to How to move a Tumblr blog without hurting PageRank? question.

I used custom domain for Tumblr for about a week, some of Tumblr domain disappeared and most of the posts appeared in new domain in search results.

After that, I moved my files to my new host, and pointed my domain name there, hoping that Tumblr won't notice the change and keep redirecting users to my domain.

Unfortunately, Tumblr realized (after 2 days) that I don't point to their servers anymore, and stopped redirecting to my domain.

Does having old blog running hurt my search results rankings because of duplicate content? If so, I want to close my Tumblr blog. On the other hand, I am considering that some people might lose track of my blog. So I am confused. What is the optimal thing to do here, close old blog or not?

Edit: I am also considering changing all posts to mere links to new content in old blog. Is it a good idea?

Answer 1

I don't know this is a good idea, but this is what I have done right now:

First of all, I edited all my posts in tumblr and replaced contents with a link that points to corresponding post on my new address.

Then, I changed RSS, archive and page url's on my tumblr theme to point to my new domain.

Then, I have put this on head section on my theme file:

{block:PermalinkPage}
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL='http://newdomain.com/{Permalink}'" />
{/block:PermalinkPage}

So that, when someone goes to a post page, he will be redirected to http://newdomain.com/http://olddomain.com/post/postid

Then, I edited title block in theme file to look like this:

{block:Title}<a href="http://newdomain.com/{Permalink}" class="h2 title">{Title}

That way, index pages will write http://newdomain.com/http://olddomain.com/post/postid as url, instead of http://olddomain.com/post/postid

Finally, I added this to my .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s/+http://[^/]+([^\s]+) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1 [R=301,L,NE]

See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19255718/how-to-write-this-301-rule-in-htaccess

The reason I didn't keep my old redirects is that, I like my new blog better than tumblr blog, and I also already paid for my hosting, so I didn't want to make it sit idle.

Answer 2

Go back to Tumblr and keep the redirects for now. When I changed the URL structure for my site, it took 2-3 months for the number of visitors to bounce back up again, so it probably takes Google that long to notice all of the 301's and transfer the link juice accordingly.

Keeping both blogs online under different url's would not only hurt you for duplicate content (though probably only slightly), but you'll also lose all of the backlinks to those url's and you'll have to start from scratch again.

Edit: I didn't notice you only used it for about a week. You probably won't have a lot of backlinks yet, so it won't hurt you that much. Of course, people that read your blog might not know the new url and you might lose a few readers.

What do you mean in your last sentence?