A few month ago I started a blog on blogspot. Just as a whim. But slowly as I started posting I realized that with effort I could really make the blog good and popular and monetize it later on, may be after a year or so.

Now my question is that should I buy a hosting account and move the blog to wodpress now when the blog is new and not that popular? Or should I wait and watch if I can really make it popular. (The blog is in an intensely competitive category).

What will be the effects if I moved a blog to its own site say after one year. Will I be charged with duplicate content penalty if I moved all my posted content to the new blog? Since the blog is on blogspot, I don’t think there is a way to put 301’s on the URLs.

But if I move the blog now will there be any problems with getting it indexed? Since it is on blogspot Google is already indexing it pretty well. (Though there is no trace of indexing in yahoo so far. But since the blog is new and there are only 20 or so posts I haven’t done any SEO / marketing effort yet. And for now I only care about Google.)

Also say after making the blog popular, If I want to build a website around the blog, will it be problematic if kept the blog on blogspot and rest of the website on its domain (Apart from it appearing unprofessional)?

What is your take on this. Feel free to suggest or comment on any aspect you can come up with.

Thank you.

Pritam Barhate.

If you're even considering changing the domain of your blog, the sooner the better. The more time you spend working on the marketing and SEO of the current blog, the more traffic you will generate. And the more traffic you generate becomes a greater potential traffic loss if you all-of-a-sudden close your doors and move to a new domain. You can always forward people to the new domain and let them know you moved, but any SEO rankings you get for the current domain will just have to be restarted on the new one. Domain age is a relatively good way to help boost your rankings... so if you spend a year in this domain, even if you move archived content over, the new domain will still be a new domain in the eyes of the SE's.

Personally, I always prefer to blog on my own domains. You have more control over the content surrounding the blog, and you'll stand apart from other blogspot bloggers with your own personal URL. Not so say there's not a place for blogspotters on the internet, but it's much better suited for casual bloggers or Google fans in my mind.