Wordpress.com to self-hosted WordPress blog

Question

I have been writing articles on the wordpress.com blog, now I am looking to move it to self-hosted wordpress blog but i wonder:

1. Should I move all my articles on the new blog or just put an article on my last blog that more articles will be posted on my new blog?

2. If I move all articles on my new blog, I am not sure about how Google will react to it because there are articles with good number of visitors, won't this be seo-un-friendly because I am not sure but Google will re-create page reputation stuff, etc or those articles will have same popularity even if I move elsewhere?

3. What are the implications and side-effects in moving from wordpress.com blog to self-hosted WordPress blog?

Answer 1

Answers to your questions:

1. Yes, you should export your articles on the new blog. This won't delete your existing articles, but will ensure everything is copied across (to allow for the other steps below).

2. If you've successfully exported all of your content and then redirected the old blog to your new one (using: http://en.support.wordpress.com/site-redirect/ ) you should have a 1-1 match for each of your blog posts. This makes the big assumption that you have set your new self-hosted blog to match the same settings as your wordpress hosted one. There might be some minor redirections required (either hard-coded in your .htaccess file, or using a redirection plugin).

3. The implications are: a) ongoing costs, b) a minor traffic dip from search engines while they reassign the search value from the old domain to the new one, c) ensuring the plugins that come with the hosted version can be mirrored on your self-hosted version.

Answer 2

Its very easy if you want to upload all the articles in your WordPress integrated website. It can be done in just 10 minutes.

As you said you have good visitors to that blog also you must get a paid account on wordpress.com. That will enable the redirecting facility and then you will get all the traffic to your new domain.