Moving from Blogger to Wordpress without losing traffic & page rank
After I moved my blog from Blogger to Wordpress, my blog was able to get same traffic when it was on Blogger. I thought this might be a “Best Practice” to move from Blogger to Wordpress. This post will be helpful to all people who are thinking about moving from Blogger to Wordpress. Let’s go in step by step on what should be done to retain your traffic, search engine index & incoming links:
- Register your own domain (which you wanted to be in wordpress) & switch your Blogger to custom domain. Now address of your Blogger blog will be www.mysite.com instead of www.mysite.blogspot.com. View Instructions to do this. Google will recognize this change very soon & start replacing results with www.mysite.com with www.mysite.blogspot.com. Also use “Google Webmaster Tools” & request Google to index your new domain by adding it.
- You will not lose any traffic during this switching, because www.mysite.blogspot.com will automatically redirect all visitors to your www.mysite.com.
- In the mean time request other bloggers who are linking to you to update their links with your custom domain.
- After search results are completely replaced by your custom domain, its time to move it to Wordpress!
- In wordpress admin panel go to “Manage—>Import” & select “Blogger”, give your username & password for Blogger & import all posts & configure it to www.mysite.com.
- Switch back your Blogger blog to .blogspot domain. Since duplicate content will reduce your page rank, you need to delete your Blogger blog. But I don’t wanted to do that, so at Google web master central I put a removal request for my whole .blogspot blog. This will remove your Blogger blog from Google’s index, but still anyone can access it. (To do this first you need to add www.mysite.blogspot.com to web master central & follow instructions)
- At wordpress, customize your “404 – Not Found” error page to have a search box, categories (tags in Blogger), Archive to have visitor to browse through your blog. This is necessary because Blogger Permalinks to post are different from wordpress permalinks & visitors from search engines will come to “404 – Not Found” page. This happens until Google updates your new wordpress Permalinks. For my blog it started updating in 3 days!
- This is time consuming but worth it. As a Blogger I know how hard is to get links from others & indexed by search engines. By following above steps you will never get out of Google’s index & your incoming links will keep linking you.
I had written this post according to my knowledge & experience. Following these steps are at your own risk & I am not responsible if anything goes wrong. If you want help doing any process mentioned above or faced any problem, comment to this post
Note: This post is written by keeping in mind that you are using wordpress 2.2 or above with self hosting & New Blogger which uses Google account to login.
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what about your feed subscribers? answer here
and do you know about Bangalore Bloggers meet
Since I used Feed Burner in my previous blog also, I just changed feed url at feed burner. So my feed readers will not get discontinued.
About Bangalore Bloggers Meet, I did’t knew about that.Thank you very much. I am enrolled for that. See you there.
But what if someone is subscribed to http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml or /rss.xml, in tha case it wil redirect all traffic to the url specified.
Ohh!
I never thought about this case.
I think there is no way you can continue feeding them.
You need to ask them by posting into your blog.
I will search resources I know & let you know if any possibility.
Are you thinking to move to wordpress?
That’s exactly my point, set up the auto redirect url in feed-settings in blogger and relax. all native blog feed subscribers will be redirected to the url mentioned there. read my post for more clarification.
No I am not switching to any other platform or my custom domain.
I read your post on that day only when you notified me.I just wanted to have a try before posting it here. I have not yet tested whether this may work. Some line in Blogger Buzz too confused me, here is that “you can now specify a URL to which Blogger will redirect your feed’s traffic. This means you’ll no longer have some subscribers getting your Blogger-hosted feed while others get your FeedBurner feed”
I might try this for my blog, thanks for the info. Need to find the time to do it.
I did try this technique though. Though I cleared off my previous blogspot and just redirect some traffic back with short previews
Ya, that’s a good idea to do if still somebody is following your blogspot blog.
good idea.
imported my posts from blogger
Hello, very nice site, keep up good job!
Admin good, very good.
Hello, very nice site, keep up good job!
Admin good, very good.
Hi, hello, privet
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very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
I would like to see a continuation of the topic
Last year, I tried to move to wordpress. But after sometime I found blogger is better since it is easier to use, though it lacks many features that we see in wordpress.
Last year I moved to wordpress, but then I saw that blogger is better, since its free and easy to use.
Gr8 post… and greater is your blog…
I never knew a techy from bangalore had such a cool blog.
I do write a blog. Looking forward to move it to wordpress..
http://www.techtola.com
please give me your views
This is very good, but if you can’t get the redirection to work, you have to try something else. I moved from Blogger to Wordpress and had to do it differently, so read my post on it also if this didn’t work for you or if you need more details.
Thanks for the info. Helped me.