Currently I have my blog on WordPress.com and am thinking of switching to self hosted on .org. I’m pretty high in Google rankings for my main keywords, either page 1 or top of 2 and my blog is quickly indexed by Google Blogsearch. Is a lot of that due to the popularity of Wordress.com itself? I assume I am getting some push in rankings from them.
If I were to go with self hosting, would it adversely affect my Google ranking? I know there are .org plugins for SEO, but I guess it would depend on how good they are and how good I am at setting the options!
If anyone has an opinion or any experience with this I'd appreciate your input.
Thanks.
On balance, I don't think that there is much (if any) difference between a wordpress.com site and a self-hosted WP site. It's the content of the pages, how they are crafted and how many inbound links you are pulling in that determines your PR.
If you move from .com to self-hosted, you will, obviously, have to start pretty much all over again building up the PR for your new site but if you keep the wordpress.com site going for a short while, you might be able to push traffic over to the self-hosted site and build the new site up that much faster.
Plugins aren't the "be all and end all" for SEO and it's unwise to reply upon them. SEO is far more complex that throwing in a few meta tags and some nice permalinks. See http://quirm.net/2009/07/02/wordpress-search-engine-optimisation/ for some further ideas.
Hope that helps.
Thanks esmi. I assumed that was the case - that if you had all your old links Google would eventually find you again.
I will check out the link and do some research into this.
rhymes
