To Move or Not to Move?

… that is the question.

Have been getting questions from people who wanted to move from their free hosted sites (BlogSpot, WordPress.com) to their own hosted blog.

Here are my usual qualifying metrics:

Age of the Blog. The older the blog, the harder it becomes for the blogger to let go of the site. Usually, other sites and blogs have already linked to it and transferring the blog to a new hosted domain will mean loosing all those link love. Unless you can contact most of them and tell them to edit your link, then there’s no other easy way.

Total Amount of Posts Made. Even if you have a 3 year old blog but only have less than 10 posts during that entire time, you can take the risk and move all the posts. What you just need to do is edit each of the posts and add a notice for new visitors to view the post on the new domain instead.

PageRank of the Site. Age of the site, inbound links and volume of content affects your PR and it’s painfull to leave a PR5 or higher and start all over again. Unless you can do a permanent redirect, there’s no way but charge this to experience and hope that in the next update, your new domain gets the same PR as the old one.

Traffic. The main reason why we worry about moving blogs — that we might loose all the traffic we get. Check how much the search engines bring in as well as from your feeds and from link referrals. This should give you an overview how much you’d expect to loose once you move.

Revenue. Along with traffic, revenue is another concern when abandoning a blog. A good way to offset this is not to close the blog but leave it the way it is (you can stop posting and disable commenting pointing them to the new URL for the post) so your earnings won’t drop drastically and you have time to get that back from your new blog.

Usually a blog less than 6 months can move to a new hosted domain without much effect on traffic. Do a quick checklist of the above and see where it leans more. Better to have your blog suffer earlier on than regret it later.