The Ghosts of Blogs Past

Like many people, I started out on WordPress.com for my blog, it was sometime in 2008.  Built up a business blog too, also on WordPress.com.

Now, most people in the know think of WordPress.com as the “poor man’s” WordPress. They are not wrong. It is WordPress.org where things get interesting. You have to become a bit of an IT Manager, but it is worth it. Some people hire a vendor – even better idea. WordPress provides a basic migration tool that brings much of what you have created over to the “other side”.

Now for the interesting part…

The OLD blog site is still there and is still being found by search engines, by others.  It makes you look REALLY bad, and amazingly bad if you are in the Social Media business like us here at IA.

I had just such an incident happen yesterday so it hits real close to home. We actually had 4 old WordPress.com blogs out there that were like abandon cars. One very insightful individual did the most logical thing in thinking that it was the live site, even though the concert dates on the calendar were all really old.

There are always issues in shutting anything with a URL down.  We still have some hooks pointed back there so this is what we did to solve the problem:

1. For every Page or Post that you think you need to leave a link in place for, do so by making them Drafts and/or Private. The links still work. This might be a time to change/update the Post/Page a bit.
2. Simply delete out the other pages so long as you think their is no linking to preserve.
3. On the Home Page, have links and text and even a graphic to redirect them to the new site.
4. This is a conservative approach.  You can just shut them down if you like as well.

Here is an example of an old site that redirects to the new site.

So – here’s the hard-earned lesson:

Anything that you create – a profile, a blog, a web site, will be there until you do something to explicitly take it down. Be thinking about what YOU might have hanging around out there…

Tagged as: mike o'neil, Rock The World, wordpress