Switching to .com domain?

I have a wordpress.com hosted blog. I've built up quite a lot of backlinks for the "websitenamehere.wordpress.com/" format. So if I buy a .com domain now, will it hurt my search engine position or help it.

It'll hurt it at first. Since the domain age will be new and no backlinks. You could reformat your wordpress.com site though to link over to the new .com. This will at least help funnel any traffic.

Are you moving your Blog to a new host altogether? If not, just set up redirection and masking, so that when people type in blah.wordpress.com, the new domain name shows up. Also, when you are doing the redirect, you can tell the search engines that it's a permanent move to the new domain.

Here's a post on it.

Actually....Google will gladly assist you with this.

Go to Google Webmaster tools. In one of the tabs, you can let Google know that your site has changed to another domain.