Forums Forums White Hat SEO Switching from WordPress.com to WordPress.org Question

  • Switching from WordPress.com to WordPress.org Question

    Posted by seohelper on September 11, 2020 at 3:25 pm

    I originally set up my site to run on [wordpress.com](https://wordpress.com). I realized I had made a mistake within a couple of months and I switched to .org. I setup the paid 301 redirect for a year and after that year passed, I stopped paying the fee and I thought I was all set.

    I’m now trying to setup Google Adsense and my application was rejected due to “scraped content.” I then ran my site through a couple of free plagiarism checkers and found that my old [wordpress.com](https://wordpress.com) site was still showing.

    After some research, I realized I should have hit the check box in the settings to hide the site… lesson learned.

    My questions:

    1. I’ve setup the paid 301 redirect again. How long should I run the redirect before I hide the [wordpress.com](https://wordpress.com) site and permanently delete it?
    2. Should I go ahead and start deleting some of the posts that were on the [wordpress.com](https://wordpress.com) site or should I just wait till I hide the site all at once?
    3. Are there any steps that I might have missed in this process to make sure that my wordpress.org site is viewed as the original content?

    steffanlv replied 3 years, 6 months ago 1 Member · 1 Reply
  • 1 Reply
  • steffanlv

    Guest
    September 12, 2020 at 7:41 am

    1. Probably until the very end of your yearly 301 plan. Make sure every page is 301d. Look up your website in Google and make sure every page on your new website ([wp.org](https://wp.org)) is indexed in Google and not the ([wp.com](https://wp.com)) website. Now, most sites don’t have every page indexed in Google and that’s ok. What you are concerned with is ensuring that Google is accurately indexing your pages from the ([wp.org](https://wp.org)) site and not the ([wp.com](https://wp.com)) one.
    2. Only if you ensure the posts being indexed currently in Google are those from your ([wp.org](https://wp.org)) iteration.
    3. You should be looking up your back links, all of them. Any back links you have that are from sites currently pointing to your old ([wp.com](https://wp.com)) site you need to try to get updated so they are pointing to the ([wp.org](https://wp.org)) site. This is why Google is calling your content copied. This is why typically pages come back into search results from pages/sites that have been previously 301’d. Because, websites are pointing to those old pages and Google keeps picking them back up again…after they have been 301’d.
    Also, you want to start creating as many relevant back links to the problematic pages as possible. It also wouldn’t be a bad idea to petition Google to remove the old ([wp.com](https://wp.com)) website, even if you have already done so. Log into GSC and make sure have the redirects setup there also. Still things you can do, for sure.