WordPress.org

1. douglerner
   Member
   Posted 12 months ago #
   

   I was reading over http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL and have a question.

   Right now my self-hosted site is http://douglerner.net. There are over 700 posts going back more than 5 years.

   If I wanted to change the site URL to http://douglerner.com (and did all the appropriate DNS changes) could I just change the site URL in the General settings and that would be it?

   In other words, are all references to the site URL just via that one variable and nothing should break and it should just work?

   Thanks,

   doug

2. Krishna
   Volunteer Moderator
   Posted 12 months ago #
   

   Are the two domains owned by you and have the same content? If so, use a redirect method to redirect from one of them to the other.

3. douglerner
   Member
   Posted 12 months ago #
   

   Yes, both domains are owned by me and have the same content. I'm not using a redirect right now, but actually having both domains go to the same location.

   I'm not sure it's really that important, and not positive I need to do this, but all my wordpress blog URL go to douglerner.net. I was just thinking maybe of having the URLs themselves go to douglerner.com.

   But maybe that's just more trouble than it's worth?

   doug

4. Krishna
   Volunteer Moderator
   Posted 12 months ago #
   

   But I find that the two URLs are opening separately with the same content. How long have you been using these domains with the same content?

5. douglerner
   Member
   Posted 12 months ago #
   

   About 30 minutes. :)

   doug

6. Krishna
   Volunteer Moderator
   Posted 12 months ago #
   

   Where do you make the original posts? Or which is your established blog? You were using an account in WordPress.com too where also I find the same posts. You can get into duplicate content issues in the eyes of major search engines like Google. If you have a Webmaster Tools account at Google you can see such problems already listed there.

7. prionkor
   Member
   Posted 12 months ago #
   

   Just changing url on general settings won't do. You have to change url of image attachments on post body to.

   Use search and replace plugin to do this.

8. douglerner
   Member
   Posted 12 months ago #
   

   What kind of problems do you see using the Webmaster Tools?

   OK. Here is the gist of it (including a few problem points):

   1. I have had a blog at Posterous for many years. In fact, until just a couple of hours ago, http://douglerner.com went to my Posterous blog. I changed the DNS and now my Posterous blog is just http://douglerner.posterous.com and douglerner.com and douglerner.net go to the same self-hosted blog.

   2. In March, Posterous announced its acquisition by Twitter. They were not encouraging at all about what will happen to Posterous in the future, and they stopped answering support requests, the service has slowed down and they closed their support forums. The handwriting is all over the wall. Since March I have been looking for an alternative to Posterous.

   3. So I created douglerner.wordpress.com because WordPress.com has a Posterous importer. And I imported everything there. I tried and tried to use wordpress.com, but there are some big issues (to me) which prevented me from using them. Among the issues were (1) lack of any control over subscribers/followers and (2) bugs with email notifications, such as invalid links being mailed.

   4. So - recently I created my self-hosted wordpress blog at douglerner.net and have been posting there as well. The reason both look the same is because just today I again deleted all the content at douglerner.net and imported it again from douglerner.wordpress.com.

   My goal is to stop using Posterous and also stop using WordPress.com.

   BUT... there is a problem.

   The import from wordpress.com to my self-hosted blog isn't perfect. Of the over 800 media files (mostly photos) imported, almost 700 are still linked to the wordpress.com site.

   All the media uploaded ok to douglerner.net, but most of them are "unattached" media, with the links in the posts themselves going back to wordpress.com. I can't think of a solution to this problem (it's not just a matter of search-and-replace URLs).

   So I think I have to keep the douglerner.wordpress.com site as a "media repository". I posted about this problem in another forum thread earlier today.

   I would like to stop using both Posterous and WordPress.com, but I am stuck at the moment. At least as far as wordpress.com goes.

   But I did get my self-hosted site working well, with post-via-email using Postie and nice notifications using Subscribe2 HTML. Those work BETTER than wordpress.com's versions.

   Anyway, getting back to the current thread. I suppose I'm making a big thing out of nothing with regards to the URL. I just thought it might be nicer for the URLs in the email notifications and on the blog to go to douglerner.com rather than douglerner.net, but it's probably not so important.

   Thanks,

   doug

9. douglerner
   Member
   Posted 12 months ago #
   

   Prionkor, most of my media links in the posts go to wordpress.com because the importer left it that way. I posted about that in a different thread. The references are too different for just a search-and-replace unfortunately. Search and replace might work for about 100 of the 800 media links, but not for the the remaining 700. So I'm resigned to leaving the wordpress.com site up until there is a better solution to maybe importing them from Posterous. That's why I'm posting the same content to Posterous as well - to keep everything in synch.

   Sort of confusing. :(

   doug

10. Krishna
    Volunteer Moderator
    Posted 12 months ago #
    

    Well, I have actually seen what you wrote above. Whatever your problem you have to stick to just one domain name and try to bring all your content there. If you delay in that you can go out of search engine indexes and ranking. Plus you can even be penalized for duplicate content.
    Here are some important points that you may note:
    1. Both your .com and .net domains are already indexed by Google
    2. Both of them currently show a Google PageRank 2 and the moment duplicate content is noticed by Google, no pages will be indexed and your ranking will go.
    3. Alexa shows a better ranking for your .com domain and 17 incoming links, while nothing is shown for .net
    4. Copyscape already shows the two domains with duplicate contents and several other domains having the same content.

    So, the issue seems to be a bit complicated to me. You may check the above facts yourself and take your own decision. As you say, creating content for over seven years is NOTE A JOKE. It requires a lot of hard work and dedication, which you have already done. So it is just painful to lose it just because of a moment of wrong decision or inactivity.

    I hope you understand it.

11. douglerner
    Member
    Posted 12 months ago #
    

    Hi, Krishna.

    I really don't understand it well, but I've been running the posterous site for years and the wordpress.com site for months and the self-hosted site for at least a month.

    I just realized the change of douglerner.com to point to the same content is not going to work because there are zillions of cached Google entries which go to posterous.com. Unfortunately posterous' URL format is different from wordpress's format (it just contains post titles, not dates) so all those links are broken when they go to the self-hosted site.

    I'm trying to revert douglerner.com to posterous while I reconsider what the best thing is to do.

    Thanks,

    doug

12. douglerner
    Member
    Posted 12 months ago #
    

    I've reverted so that:

    (1) douglerner.com is again going to my Posterous site.

    (2) douglerner.net is going to my self-hosted wordpress site.

    How do these services judge "duplicates" when the URLs and themes, etc., are different?

    Anyway, I'm not sure what to do, but I'm back where I've been for some months now.

    doug

13. douglerner
    Member
    Posted 12 months ago #
    

    I was just checking the PR for some other domains I have, and even those with a page rank of zero show up multiple times on the first page of a Google search.

    Anyway, I'm going to sit back and take a breath here. Setitngs are back to what they were. I'm not going to attempt to make douglerner.net and douglerner.com the same content, at least not for now.

    It's a shame what's happening with Posterous though. That is the cause of all the confusion.

    doug

14. Krishna
    Volunteer Moderator
    Posted 12 months ago #
    

    It is very simple. Stick to one domain, and if possible redirect other domains having the same content if you can. If you cannot, simply delete duplicate content wherever you have. It will have some loss of ranking for some weeks, but you will have one good blog with a better ranking very soon. It is a very hard decision, I know. But you have to live with it for the time-being. You cannot afford to lose seven years of work without getting their proper ranking. Can you?

    So, decide for yourself. All the best.

15. douglerner
    Member
    Posted 12 months ago #
    

    Thanks. Thinking about the best way with...

    1. Posterous future uncertain.

    2. WordPress.com not working right.

    3. Self-hosted site import needing WordPress.com site for serving media which didn't import well.

    Thanks,

    doug

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