Hey guys!
The wonderful wide web hasn’t given me a good answer on my specific situation, so hopefully you might be my saviors.
Since starting a Ghost blog, I wanted to move some of my original content from Wordpress.com (the free version). Yes, I was a beginner, but free was free.
Basically, I’m copy-pasting all my post content to Ghost. I plan on making my Ghost blog the main source while 301 redirecting from the Wordpress blog. I’m aware of the Canonical link, but am wondering:
Should I just delete the Wordpress.com posts, or is there a way to redirect?
It seems most people mention editing a file on the self-hosted Wordpress.org. Of course, that’s not possible with Wordpress.com.
I’m also aware of all incoming traffic links. Fortunately, I didn’t have that much traffic from outside sources like Twitter, so I may just edit or delete possible links out there. Which leads me to my next question:
Does deleting the Wordpress.com post and deleting the canonical link in Ghost hurt my SEO?
Any insight would be greatly appreciated. And I’m kicking myself in the rear for even posting it on Wordpress.com & Medium.
Hey @databug,
first of all, there is a WP Plugin from Ghost Ghost – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org to help you transfer your content from wordpress to your ghost blog, to save you some time copy pasting.
Second, the only thing, search engines dont like is getting a 404 response from a once existing page.
So what you want to do is copy all your posts and pages from wordpress to ghost and make sure they’re all reachable.
To make sure your old visitors still find your posts and pages on the same URL you can work with routes and redirects (both files are found in ghost admin > labs).
Regarding google, you restart googles indexing by submiting your new sitemap
See here: Ask Google to Recrawl Your Website | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google Developers
Default sitemap URL in ghost is: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml
Feel free to ask, if you have questions.
Thanks, @daniel1!
However, I was looking for a free way to transfer from wordpress . com . I guess I’ll have to pay the $25 Business plan in order to use the Ghost plugin. Probably not worth it for a few posts.
Interestingly, I took a look at Wordpress’ redirect tool. It costs $13/yr. Again, probably not worth it for a few posts. But hopefully this helps another reader.
Good to know about the redirects and sitemaps! I deleted a few test Ghost posts but realized crawlers were getting 404s.
I’ve decided to keep the posts on both websites, provide canonical links on Ghost, then just tell Wordpress readers to visit my new site. Then fix my sitemap.
As a side note, the more I think about Google’s crawlers, the more I imagine bots with arms and legs skittering around on all fours.
Oh well, i didn’t know you couldn’t install plugins on the free tier at wordpress.com, my bad.
I guess you want to move away from wordpress altogether, so paying for a redirect tool wouldn’t be the best solution either, i totally agree with you on that.
I don’t know your current setup, but i guess your domain.com points to wordpress.
Let’s say your permalink setup in wordpress is something like:
domain.com/category/postname you could interchange the categories from wordpress with tags from ghost and keep your URL altogether (postname should stay the same, at least it did for me when i migrated from wordpress to ghost).
Or you keep your wordpress permalink structur alive and just redirect it via the redirects.json file in ghost admin, so ghost knows what to do, when someone visits domain.com/category/postname eg. redirect to domain.com/tag/postname.
As soon as that is working:
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Change DNS to point domain.com to ghost server IP
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Change site URL of ghost via ghost-cli:
$ ghost config url https://domain.com
$ ghost setup ssl nginx
$ ghost restart
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Go to https://search.google.com/u/1/search-console/ and add your new sitemap url under “Sitemaps” → “Add a new sitemap” (Standard sitemap url for ghost is https://domain.com/sitemap.xml
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Regarding 404, that’s normal. Just delete the demo posts from ghost or take them private. Submitting your new sitemap and restarting the crawling process will get rid of 404 errors in your search console.
Like that?
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Close! But I was thinking more like this:
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