Problems transferring blog

Hi all,

So I’ve been researching this problem for quite some time now, and am still at a loss. Your help is highly appreciated

I have a blog that has been hosted by wordpress.com for quite some time now, and I have always had it mapped to blog.mydomain.com

My goal is to get my blog running off of my own server under mydomain.com/blog for more flexibility & SEO purposes.

But I don’t want to loose all the traffic & links that I have acquired on my old blog. I thought I might install wordpress under blog.domain.com, continue to have wordpress.com map there, and then redirect blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog, where I will also have my blog installed.

Unfortunately I can’t install wordpress on blog.domain.com because when I put in the URL for blog.domain.com/wp-admin/install.php, it defaults to the wordpress.com mapped URL, and not the URL in my subdomain. Would this method even work anyway?

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to accomplish this task? I’ve read everything and still feel lost. Thanks!