I am starting a blog with wordpress. Here are some questions I have: If I start the blog with wordpress on the url myblog.wordpress.com and then buy the domain name myblog.com and forward it with a mask, how will this affect the SEO? Is it better to buy myblog.com and get a hosting account and install wordpress on it? what are the SEO advantages and disadvantages of either of these strategies?
It is better if you buy a new domain name. Finally the myblog.com will not be indexed but the myblog.wordpress.org will. So then there is no need to buy a domain name. But if you want to be taken serious you really need you own domain name and a serious webhost. Installing wordpress is easy, done in 5 minutes and you will have more flexibility. The disadvantage is that you begin with pagerank 0. But for the long term you will get a lot more visitors on your own domain then that you will get on a free webhost.
I Agree, Mainly for SEO purposes. Even though it may cost a little more up front, it should pay off in the end.
Hi smorse1. Like the others, I would recommend you to start your blog with your own myblog.com domain right away. Do it right the first time so that you don't need to be concerned about doing a permanent redirection to your new blog in future. 3 years ago, I started my blog at a subdomain malcolm.mmuzone.com. After getting a little more popular with PR 3, I thought I should get my own domain name for this site. Although I was able to do permanent redirection in my .htaccess to indicate to search engines that I have moved to malcolmwong.com, Technorati does not update my URLs it indexed before my migration even until today. As a result, I lost quite some traffic for a few months and build the site from scratch.
I have recently done this for the first time and I must say that the installation is a breeze and wordpress does give you all kinds of options.