301 redirect for wordpress domains

While wordpress.com has given you a way to blog under your own domain using custom mapped domains …. it hasn’t been a perfect solution. If you set it up right when you started blogging, there is no issue, your content gets out on the net under your own domain (eg. joesmith.com rather than joesmith.wordpress.com). But for those of us that have a subdomain well established under wordpress.com it was less than ideal. Why? Because the redirect from xxx.wordpress.com to xxx.com was a 302 redirect rather than a 301 redirect.

302 redirects, which means “temporarily moved” are treated by the search engines in an unpredictable manner, your original URL might get indexed or your new one .. who knows. In contrast, a 301 redirect, “moved permanently”, created a much better chance of your new URL getting the index and the traffic.

wordpress has fixed this now though, now the redirect from your wordpress.com subdomain to your custom domain is now a search engine friendly 301 redirect. Now, there is no excuse for me not to create a domain for my real estate wordpress.com blog.