LinkedIn/WordPress Application Domain Mapping Problem

Development
Screenshot of LinkedIn WordPress application, broken
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.

7 responses to “LinkedIn/WordPress Application Domain Mapping Problem

  1. Hi David, your post describes my problem exactly. Yes, I migrated from .com to .org. Yes, I purchased an extra for mapping my domain on WordPress.com. Yes, Linkedin erroneously points back to the old .com blog.

    But I can somehow not figure out how to delete the .com domain mapping extra …..

    What are the exact steps I need to take ? Any help extremely appreciated – I am going nuts here.

    1. If I remember rightly you have to sign into the back-end of that domain and delete or stop the addon for the domain. Sadly it’s been a while, so I can’t memorise the route and I’m a bit stretched just right now so can’t help further. Good luck! You can always ask in the wordpress.com forums – they may be able to help.

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