We have all started blogging by practicing it first on free blog space providers like WordPress.com or blogger.com or typepad.com and many other similar kind of services. Many bloggers I know of have started making their hands dirty by working on WordPress.com in the first place. Then the things rolled on and we moved on from the free service with imposed (minimal)restrictions to a completely self-contained domains for which we choose the names and we pay the price.
WordPress.com provides the URL for a newly created blog in this manner: blogname.wordpress.com. In the long run, when the blogger wishes to launch his own blog on his own web space, he can redirect the users from the blog hosted on wordpress.com to his own “blogname.com”.
Lets discuss what the effects of redirecting were earlier and what’s gonna happen now.
WordPress.com provides you an option to choose a domain as your primary domain. This means that once this setting is saved, the users arriving to access your old blog on wordpress.com would be automatically redirected to the new domain name set as the primary domain.
That’s great. Would the search engines know about all this?
Yes, they surely are made aware that the location of the blog has changed from Wordpress.com to a new home. Until now this was performed by a 302 Redirect, which states that the Search engines are informed about the new home and to index the new home, BUT, not to forget the old one on WordPress.com site.
Starting from May 27th, 2010, WordPress.com has changed the 302 Redirects to 301 Redirects, which means that the search engines are informed about the new home and asked to FORGET ABOUT THE OLD ONES hosted on WordPress.com.
The reasons why WordPress.com has changed the permanent redirects from 302 to 301 is mentioned in brief here.
