I currently have a well ranked blog on Squarespace . I want to consider moving the stuff over to Wordpress. My question: Will I lose any search rankings if I switch blogging platforms? Squarespace is web hosted whereas WP is on your own servers. And on a more general level, are there any negative side effects that I should be aware of when switching from one blogging platform to another? thanks.
If the domain differs, you'd lose your rankings and have to get anyone linking to update their link to the new domain -- unless you can redirect the old urls to the new ones. If the domain stays the same it shouldn't make much difference, but there are individual pages indexed as well so you'd need to get the squarespace urls redirected to wordpress (an .htaccess file is useful for creating rules to transform the urls). Of course if you only used a domain to redirect to squarespace.com/something then the pages under squarespace.com's domain won't be redirectable. As far as which is really better long term, having control over your hosting always allows you to optimize your site better for search engines and takes away the risk of losing your url.
Well you have to make sure you transfer all of it.. And i think as long as you keep the same content and website address you should be fine..
Hoth- Just to clarify, the domain will stay the same. It should also be noted that a Squarespace site is hosted on their servers not my own. I guess this won't make it allowable for me to redirect those indexed pages to the new site? Because once I transfer the content, I will have to delete the Squarespace account.