Free Wordpress Blog on Page 1 of Google..Should I change over to self hosted?

I'll give you my 2 cents

First I would suggest you move your blog to a self-hosting blog. Never use wordpress.com for any type of serious blog with the purpose of making money or generating any type of income....it's against the terms and other fine print when you sign up for a free wordpress.com blog.

The danger in using a third party hossting solution like wordpress.com or blogger.com is that you lose control of your blog. If the hosting solution disappears...so does your blog. If you offend them....poof....your blog is gone.

When you transfer the blog, you will lose all your pagerank. The entire site will have to get spidered and indexed again.

Not too long ago, I had a wordpress.com blog that unexpecedly started to grow, I spend some time and before long it had a pr3, I had good traffic and I was making a nice income from affiliate sales.

It wasn't a spam blog, good articles....all written by myself. I had some affiliate links in the sidebar and some of the posts were reviews for niche related products.

After about 4 months I tried to make a post one day and I got an error message, shortly afterwards I got an email from the folks at wordpress.com. My blog was getting shut down for violation of their terms of service. You can't post affiliate links, sell any products or use a wordpress.com blog for generating income.

Seems as though someone from the wordpress.com network reported my blog.

They did give me some time to download the .xlm file so I could transfer the blog. In about a week the blog was gone.

Sooooooo

Your blog blatantly violates their terms of service and if someone would report it.....you'll get that dreaded notice. So I would transfer the blog as soon as possible.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news! I know how frustrating it can be, but you'll be happier with a self-hosted blog since you'll have no restrictions and many more options.

Good Luck

Scott

IMO self-hosted is best.

I've heard of Wordpress.com terminating accounts because of affiliate links.

Reading Wordpress.com terms of service it states, and I quote: "...does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites.."

You don't want to just pickup and move. You want to keep the WordPress.com blog in place and use it to springboard your new self-hosted WordPress blog.

Backup all the current content on your WP.com blog and store it in a safe place just in case something were to happen to your blog.

Get your new self-hosted blog up and running with the theme and features you want. Make a welcome post there, opening the doors so to speak.

Put a post on your old WP.com blog announcing your new blog. Also put a prominent link to it in your sidebar. Leave your old blog 'as is'.

What should happen over time is that your new blog will gradually gain the authority from the old blog while the old one drops back or stays static.

Oh wow! Thanks for the input. I've already researched out new themes but I didn't realize the urgency until now. Thanks again...

First of all congrats on page one - always a cool thing! I've lost a wordpress hosted blog a while back (yup - they remove it for commercial purposes) so know the urgency you have!

I also about 4 months ago, for an offline client - moved their first blog that was hosted on wordpress to their own hosting service and domain - and after 4 months - they are now on page one of google. It slowly moved up over the past 4 months from nowhere to page 3, page, 2, now page 1.

I did a complete copy, don't worry about the duplicate content - outsourced the work to a scriptlance resource to move all the files over etc. and just 'left' the old wordpress blog up but put a post on it - 'We've moved - click here for our new website location' and also put it in the blogroll (nice linkjuice!)

On the new hosted blog, i did add a new page as well - to add fresh content and also did all the SEO loving plugins and some social bookmarking to the site.

Hope that helps, cheers, maria gudelis

set up your self-host blog and turn it into a money site, and use your wordpress hosted site to funnel traffic to your money site.

Aside from what the other folks here said, I highly suggest a self hosted blog because it gives your business/service a more "serious" or "professional" look. I've always been a bit wary of blogs or websites hosted via third party hosting (I'm not saying that all of them are fake or suspicious, no) and IMO, I've always believed that if you're really serious with your business, what's a small investment (hosting, customized themes etc) to show that you're confident with your services/products, yes?

Hey Passivecashgal, Congrats on your number one listing. As most have stated already, self hosted is the Only way to Go at this stage of your sites Evolution.

IMHO, pagerank, is neither here nor there, in terms of actually ranking for a particular phrase, what is important, though is solid fundamental SEO.

So yes in time PR will eventually come back, however, you can start working towards the number one slot, for your target phrase almost instantly with your new site. So in 3 months or less, with some solid work, I can envisage, you announcing back here again that, the job is done!!!

Using the free blogs for testing out keyword combinations and niches is a good strategy. You can monitor the result, see if the site gets traffic and a good position. Then make a copy of the free site and put it on the self hosted domain.

Make sure you have a dofollow link from the free host to the paid one so it can pass page rank.

Switching to a self-hosted blog on your own domain would absolutely kill your rankings because your new site will have zero authority. Right now your able to rank well because you are leveraging the authoritativeness of wordpress.com

As others have suggested your best bet would be to funnel traffic to a new site and or start building a list.

By the way your rankings are slipping as we speak. I see your sited ranked #5.

1.) Get a paid (self) hosted website/blog using the same keyword phrase.
2.) Link from your high ranking free wordpress blog to your hosted blog/website using your main keyword as anchor text.
3.) Monetize your new hosted site/blog with affiliate products, adsense ads etc.

Good luck!

Having your own hosting for wordpress blogs is the best option. You can use Caffeinated Content plugin and your blog will be up with rich content in minutes. heres a squidoo lens on CC plugin

Caffeinated Content Plugin

checkout www.fastblogcontent.com for the best deal on CC. Also 1 year free hosting is included along with the sale if needed.

-Dan

Great post by Maria G! You would probably want to keep your wordpress blog in its current place and use it to launch and promote your new domain hosted wordpress blog. Make sure that you've backed up all the current information on your current WP blog and store it safely online or offiline just in some of the data may be lost.

Then try getting your new domain-hosted blog up and running with the a new theme and welcome page to entice others in. Then try putting a post on your old wordpress blog directing people to your new one, with a clear easy to read link on the page, then just leave your old blog the way it is. This should hopefully direct visitors to your new blog and give the impression that the old blog is redundant and new one is the one to follow! Hope this helps!