Migrating to Wordpress from Blogger

[Mkcoy]

Hello all I have considered this for a while and have learned pros and cons to doing it but have never done it myself. I am going to do this though now definitely because of the SEO benefits of Wordpress or rather in having my own hosting account instead of relying on Blogger.

I have sellyourmobile.info and it's hosted on Blogger. The orginal url is sellyourmobile.blogspot.com. What I want to do is transfer all my blogger posts to wordpress. I will install an add-on domain on my hosting account and install WordPress to the public_html folder and set the nameservers in my domains registrar to the nameserver of my hosting account and I should have sellyourmobile.info on my new hosting account with a fresh WordPress install.

From there I can import my blogger posts from Blogger using the WordPress import tool but Blogger and WordPress create different Permalinks. Blogger doesn't use stop words like "the" or "and" so the link text is different. You can add the tags in canonical section of WordPress to get round this or use a plugin so all your posts links are the same.

After this though there will still be content on the sellyourmobile.blogspot.com domain. And the same content will be on the sellyourmobile.info domain as well if you get me.

Will this be duplicate content to Google? Also has anyone done this successfully? There is talk about images in posts not transfering like the posts text/html does. And some people say to use a redirect script in the old blogspot domain to transfer all traffic and PR to the new post.

I guess also if you have a large amount of posts there could be some time spent making sure all the slugs are correct so no broken links.

Another thing to do I guess would be revert sellyourmobile.info back to sellyourmobile.blogspot.com and then set up sellyourmobile.info on the new WordPress install. Then just create new posts on sellyourmobile.info.

But would it mean any of my posts that were created as say; sellyourmobile.info/blogpost.html and are now sellyourmobile.blogspot.com/blogpost.html because I cancelled the custom domain, are new to search engines because the domain used to be just sellyourmobile.info and not with the blogspot.com in it? God I hope you understand but you see what I mean?

Would appreciate your insight into this if you have knowledge about it/doing it. Thanks to come from many people to get sell your mobile working right.

[sub001]

Re: moving... since sellyourmobile.blogspot.com is not indexed, setting up your site under sellyourmobile.info on another server (provided the URLs won't change) will not cause you any problems. The only thing Google will notice is the changed IP address, which is a non-issue.

However, once you move, you do want to make sure that no content is served from sellyourmobile.blogspot.com or that it's properly redirected to sellyourmobile.info. Otherwise you are potentially facing a duplicate content issue.

[ErictheBeehiveHairdresser]

I did this back in early 2007 so it's not too fresh in my memory of how it exactly worked.

That said, it did not create duplicate google entries. The blogspot one took the backseat to the one that was the actual domain. In fact, my domain version took off as far as getting much better page ranking from google.

The images (and everything) comments, links, titles and words moved over one by one. While I was scared to death that it would delete some content or leave out the images, the actual process was much easier and smoother than I had imagined.

As far as redirecting from a blogspot to a domain, I would put a post up that lets readers know that you moved to the new domain and not do a complete redirect. I've heard that redirects from blogspot to domains can hurt your status within google by making them think that your domain is a spamming website of sorts. (I could be terribly wrong about this, but it make me not do a full redirect.)


Just make sure that once your posts are uploaded to the domain that you drop your domain name into search engines several times a day for the first few days. It will get the search engine's spiders to find you quicker. (Or perhaps give the appearance of finding your domain quicker)

[Mkcoy]

Originally Posted by sub001

However, once you move, you do want to make sure that no content is served from sellyourmobile.blogspot.com or that it's properly redirected to sellyourmobile.info. Otherwise you are potentially facing a duplicate content issue.

Hello thanks for your response. That is the thing, once I cancel the custom domain from within blogger settings back to the old sellyourmobile.blogspot.com domain, all posts will be as sellyourmobile.blogspot.com/post1.html etc etc and not sellyourmobile.info/post1.html etc anymore.

Even though I've set the url slugs correctly there will still be 2 versions of the post. sellyourmobile.blogspot.com/post1.html and sellyourmobile.info/post1.html

This will mean new (dupe) content to the search engines wont it. I have set up wordpress in an addon domain on my hosting account and need to update the nameservers from bloggers ghs.google.com to my hostings nameserver address and then do the post import.

Once I've done that and ensure all the posts slugs and slug titles are all correct what should I do about the sellyourmobile.blogspot.com blog and address?

Should I set up a redirect refresh="0" script in the header?
Should once I've transfered all posts, delete the sellyourmobile.blogspot.com blog on blogger or at least just delete or set it to private or set the posts to draughts or delete the posts. Creating a new one linking to my new location?

sellyourmobile.blogspot.com isn't indexed so I don't want to leave posts on there when I've moved them to sellyourmobile.info/post1.html etc on the new WordPress installation on my hosting account.

I am sure there are many people who have done this before and can offer some more insight into doing this successfully.

Eric interesting that you say The images (and everything) comments, links, titles and words moved over one by one.So there was no problem with your slug links then? Blogger doesn't use stop words like "the" or "and" so links saved as "This-is-the-post-link.html" will be "this-is-post-link.html" and not this-is-the-post-link.html if you see this post it says: You need to change the Permalinks section first. Blogger and WordPress convert post titles into URLs differently. Blogger leaves out stop words like “and” and “the.” You can fix this with a WordPress plugin called Redirection and other plugins can do this now too.

Go into the in in WordPress and type this line /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

This is to match the post structure of your Blogger blog, to minimize the number of broken links and redirects. However if you have many posts with many different words or any symbols in them you will need to go through them all and check them manually.

I think I can do it it's just what to do about the posts on the the old version.

[sub001]

I don't know how Blogger works, so can answer only in terms of concepts. You have two options with regards to the old blogger account after you change your domain's DNS: (1) delete the blogspot blog or (2) redirect to the new site. Since the blogspot.com URLs aren't indexed, deleting the blog seems like the simplest/cleanest solution.

[Florencia]

As far as redirecting from a blogspot to a domain, I would put a post up that lets readers know that you moved to the new domain and not do a complete redirect. I've heard that redirects from blogspot to domains can hurt your status within google by making them think that your domain is a spamming website of sorts. (I could be terribly wrong about this, but it make me not do a full redirect.)

[TheMakeupSnob]

2 months ago I left blogger to go to wordpress. There are a ton of guides on the net that explain how to make the transition. You mentioned permalinks. There is a pulugin you can use to convert links. Wordpress also lets you choose how you want links to appear.

when I made the transtion I posted on it here as well as linked other resources I found helpful when making the transition. I hope its ok to post this link and good luck with the change. you will love it.

Moving Blogger to Wordpress | The Makeup Snob.com

[ErictheBeehiveHairdresser]

Now that you mention it, I went back and noticed that the individual post URLs had become screwed up with the April 2007 import. While the content (words, images and comments) all migrated through without any issue, the URLs got screwed up from it.

For some reason if the URL of an individual Blogger post was too short, the WordPress post became elongated with the first few words of the post. I never really noticed it and didn't seem to have a problem with Google or search engines from it.

Then again, when I made the switch, my traffic at the time was tiny at around 150 people per day, so there wasn't that much traffic in general, let alone search engine traffic, to have gotten screwed up by it.

Having said all that, I took a peak at your blog and it appears as though you've made the switch. How did it end up going?