The LinkedIn WordPress application picking up old content from the wrong place.

We had an interesting one today. The LinkedIn WordPress application is a widget that allows you to have your latest WordPress posts on your site. The references within it all relate to WordPress.com – however, I knew it worked full well with self-hosted WordPress.org sites as well as I use the application.

So I was a bit bemused when a client called today to say that they were only getting old posts in LinkedIn. My initial reaction is to consider this a LinkedIn/Automattic problem because they’re the ones that supply the application, not us. However, a support contract is a support contract.

Looking a bit more deeply I could confirm what was happening.  If you put http://janbritton.org into the field it got changed to http://janbritton.wordpress.com – how peculiar.

Domain Mapping

So as is my usual approach to this, I wondered what it could be that could relate the domain janbritton.org to the old blog they had on WordPress.com – and I could think of only one possibility.

When we migrate a WordPress.com site to WordPress.org the first stage is to get the domain and map it on the original blog.  We then take leave the site running like that for a month before then pointing the domain at the site’s new server.  It’s a simple way to maintain your link juice, and is very effective.

But what happens when you use the LinkedIn WordPress app is that for some reason it looks up the domain on WordPress.com and uses the WordPress.com URL rather than the mapped domain.  I guess there are reasons for this, but if you’ve migrated your blog from WordPress.com this could be mighty confusing.

The answer is to delete the WordPress.com domain mapping extra.  You can’t just change your primary domain – you have to delete the domain you’re using for the live site.  Otherwise the application won’t work correctly.  This may well cause us some future migration headaches for heavy LinkedIn users of WordPress.com going self-hosted.

Still – I had a play with Alexa and Google and the stats were interesting to see. WordPress.com has practically exploded. If Alexa’s 2% reach is correct then that makes WordPress.com and all its blogs into one of the most potent internet nodes.

Looking for traffic to WordPress.org and its rivals (I’ve put in Joomla, Plone and Drupal) is also illuminating. I recommend a good play around with the charts. Also look at different regions if you’re working with Google.

Google’s CMS traffic

Alexa’s CMS traffic

I find these stats sites great fun. You can also see the effects of certain events. For example, searches for the word Botfly shot up and into existance last year – and these correlated with spikes in traffic to my story of my own experience of the little blighters. The reason was a TV show.

You can also get a taste for the desires of certain countries… French Kissing, it seems, generates huge interest in Pakistan. They also like English Girls.