Just as the topics states, I recently switched my blog from wordpress.com, identically over to my own host with wordpress.org. My Questions: 1. Should I delete the wordpress.com blog? If I don't will my google page rank for my main host site get screwed up? 2. Should I redirect my wordpress.com directly to my host site and just keep both updated with identical content so I receive wordpress.com traffic? 3. Other options? Keep in my mind the sites are identical, the only difference now my main one is now self hosted on "domainname.net" instead of "domainname.wordpress.com. Thanks for your time.
No. Do not delete the old site, leave it be. Make sure there are ample notices and links to the new site. After a while, you may want to delete the old posts, once you start getting a steady stream of search engine traffic to the new site, but for now...just leave it alone. You can't get into wordpress.com and do a redirect, so if you delete them, they will be lost in the serps, while your new blog struggles to take it's place with the same content. Besides that, if you delete it, any readers you have will assume that you just went away..How else will they know ? Your older posts will still get the same indexing on the old site (that's why you want to link to the new one) , and the new site may have some duplicate content issues on the older posts, but not on any posts from here on out. I switched a blog over almost 2 years ago, and I still get traffic (a small amount) from the old blog, even though it's nothing but a small paragraph linking to the new site.
What about a site like blogwell.com? They redirect their wordpress.com site directly to their host which is identical to their press.com blog. I believe thye pay 10 $ a year for this feature, do you know about this option? I could be wrong just a hunch. I just think grabbing free .com traffic would be a nice advantage, especially if it redirects directly to your host. I saw a post somewhere on the net about how to do it through nameservers, I think it was an official wordpress.com post....
I haven't used wordpress.com in a while, but if that is an option, hell yeah I would do it for 10 bucks ! I don't know if it's necessary to post identical information, but I would certainly take a year of redirects, and if it is good for some traffic, keep it that way.