I started a blog and didn't imagine it would grow as it did, I've read alot of info on this but have not been able to get down to the after the facts. I purchased my own domain, I've got it set up and online with the new name and hosting, I've imported all the content from the old blog - I am well aware that the ranks and linking structure is most likely lost. I wonder now, do I continue to re-direct the wordpress.com blog to the new one? Leave it and let the search engines find it? What happens since these are identical - with the duplicate content? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
To prevent the dup content you can unpublish the posts on your wordpress.com blog, then set up a single page on your wordpress.com account that redirects browsers to your new domain. I'm not sure whether or not you can create a default page to redirect 404s.
That is exactly what I did. My wordpress.com blog got a PR 4 on the first update, so I scrambled to make an "honest" blog out of it. I definitely deleted all of the posts from my old blog, once I had the content transfered, and set a link to it from the old blog. Luckily the PR on the new blog shot to a PR 4 on it's first update. Do all the normal SEO on the new one...you will find that you are able to get better links, now that it is self hosted.