Friday, February 26, 2010

Move your blog



Move your blog from blogspot to wordpress without loosing search engine ranking position

In this post, i will guide you 'How to move your blog/website from blogspot.com to self hosted wordpress platform without loosing your search engine traffic (SERP) or disturbing your page rank.


Blogger and Wordpress provides import and export contents and comments feature so what are the issues in moving your blog?


The issues are:


1. Some of your articles on the blogspot blog could already be indexed and could be ranking high in search engines for certain keywords but once you shift these articles to a new domain, you might lose all that search traffic.


2. You cannot use a 301 permanent redirect with Blogger to inform search engines that your site has permanently moved., thus you will loose search engine traffic and you will also loose your page rank.

3. Those who come to read your old articles via links from other sites won't know about the new location of those articles.
4. If you are not using feedburner or feedblitz, existing blog readers who are subscribed to your Blogger RSS Feed may be lost forever if they don't manually update their RSS readers with your new WordPress feed address.

5. When you lose RSS subscribers and search engines rankings, the pageviews of your website will drop that will impact your revenues.

Result: you have to start from scratch.

Now that you are aware of the issues associated with moving your sites from Blogger to Wordpress, So, is there any solution for moving your websites from blogger to wordpress custom domain website with loosing hurting your traffic? the answer is YES.

You can safely migrate your blog from Blogger to Wordpress without losing traffic, RSS Subscriber and pagerank.

Important Note: 
Backup your Blogspot blog first by downloading the XML template, posts and comments.
Before implenting these steps on your actual blog, it may be a good idea to run through these steps on a dummy blog first. 

Now, 

Steps: Move your Blogspot Blog to Wordpress Custom Domain

Step 1: 
Go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard > Tools > Import and select the Blogger option.
Authorize WordPress to access your Google Account and within minutes, all your old blog posts and comments will be available on the new WordPress site.

Step 2: 
Download this file and upload this file into your WordPress themes directory (current theme).
Contents of this file are :
/*
Template Name: blogger
*/

global $wpdb;
$old_url = $_GET['q'];

if ($old_url != "") {
$permalink = explode("blogspot.com", $old_url);

$q = "SELECT guid FROM $wpdb->posts LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta ".
"ON ($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->postmeta.post_id) WHERE ".
"$wpdb->postmeta.meta_key='blogger_permalink' AND ".
"$wpdb->postmeta.meta_value='$permalink[1]'";

$new_url = $wpdb->get_var($q)? $wpdb->get_var($q) : "/";

header ("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: $new_url");
}
?>
Note: do not edit this file and upload to your current wordpress theme directory.


Step 3: 
Open your WordPress dashboard and go to Pages > Add New Page. 
Keep the title and URL of that page as blogger and select "blogger" from the Template drop-down (you'll find at right side) and Save. No need to add any content to this page.

Step 4. Open this template generator page, type the full address of your new WordPress blog and this tool will create a new classic template for your blogspot blog.

Step 5:
Open your Blogger Dashboard > Layout > Edit HTML and choose "Revert to Classic Blog" (you'll find this link at the bottom). 
Copy - paste the template generated code (ref: Step 4) in the "Edit Template" area and click "Save Template Changes".

Step 6:
Insert the following between the and tags of your old blog:


After seeing this, search engines should remove your old blog from their cache and the old content will stop existing for them. Therefore they are not going to penalize your new blog for duplicate content.


Your are done. Open any page on your old Blogger blog and it should redirect you to the corresponding WordPress page. Since we are using a permanent 301 redirect with the redirection URLs, all the Google Juice will probably pass to your new WordPress pages with time.

Update your RSS Feed: 
When you move from Blogger to WordPress, the address of your RSS feed will change as well. 

If you are using feedburner,
Step 1: Login to your feedburner account
Step 2: click on your old blogger feed
Step 3: click on 'Edit Feed Details' (on the top)
Step 4: change 'Original Feed' to your new wordpress rss feed address
Done

If you're not using feedburner, follow these steps
Go to Blogger > Settings > Site Feed, type the address of your new WordPress RSS feed here and RSS subscribers will automatically move to your new feed. 

That's it. Hope you like my post.

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