So apparently it’s not that simple to get out from under the thumb of WordPress.com.
I want to use a custom domain name and my own hosting instead of onlydarksets.wordpress.com, but I would like to retain my Google/Yahoo/Live search rankings. I had hoped throwing a little cash at it would do the trick, but apparently all that gets you is 302 redirects, which are “temporary” redirects. In common parlance, that tells the browser how to get to the page, but it does not tell the search engine spiders to update your URLs. So, Google will continue to think that onlydarksets.wordpress.com contains all of my existing posts.
WordPress.com suggests simply paying them $10/year for life to redirect the old links to my new site. After thinking a little more about why I was doing this, I’m thinking $10/year ain’t a bad proposition.
The good news is that, from this point on, the search engines will use onlydarkets.com for new posts.
onlydarksets 