If you are like me and have decided to move your blog from blogspot.com to wordpress.com (the shared WordPress hosting site), you are asking yourself three questions:
- How to redirect visitors to the old blog automatically to the new pages.
- How to transfer the PageRank of your old blog to the new one.
- How to prevent being penalized by Google for duplicate content.
Is it possible ? Read on.
First of all, let me give credit where credit is due – there are some instructions already published
- Tom Sherman has a nice manual for moving from the old Blogger to self-hosted WordPress.
- TechCounter similar to the one above but contains erroneous information about preserving PageRank.
- Webbleyou is a tutorial for migrating from Blogger Beta, but I find it unnecessarily complicated.
Bottomline: None of those tutorials work for moving to the shared hosting on WordPress.com!
Solution
- Redirect your visitors using JavaScript and meta tag redirects. Read below.
- Bad news, this is not possible. Tom Sherman correctly states
This would require a 301 Permanent Redirect and access to the server, not provided by Blogger.
- To avoid penalties to your Google Page Rank for duplicate content, have Google remove the old blog from its cache and instruct the crawler to ignore the old site from now on. Read below below.
Set up redirects
I’m assuming that at this point you have imported your posts to the new blog at WordPress.com (if not, go to “Manage/Import”, select the obvious choice and do what you’re said).
Log into your Blogger account and click your way through the awkward navigation menu until you are at the “Template/Edit HTML” page. To redirect visitors from the main page, insert the following between the <head> and </head> tags:
<meta content='6;url=http://yournewblog.wordpress.com/' http-equiv='refresh'/>
“6″ stands for six seconds. This is the redirection timeout. Replace the url with your own.
The tricky part comes now. We want to redirect users from individual post pages to the corresponding post pages on the new blog. To that end, we need a piece of JavaScript spiced with Blogger proprietary tags. Insert the following right after “<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>” in the template:
<b:widget id='Redirector' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'>
<b:includable id='main'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<b:loop values='data:posts' var='post'>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var new_page='yournewblog.wordpress.com/';
var permalink = '<data:post.url/>';
var timestamp = '<data:post.timestamp/>';
timestamp = timestamp.split('/');timestamp = timestamp[2]+'/'+timestamp[0]+'/'+timestamp[1];
new_page = permalink.replace(/youroldblog\.blogspot\.com\/2007\/[0-9]{2}/,new_page+timestamp);
new_page = new_page.replace(/\.html$/,'');
document.location.href = new_page;
</script>
</b:loop>
</b:if></b:includable></b:widget>
Don’t forget to enter your new blog’s URL at var new_page = .
Important note! For this script to work, all your posts should have been imported to WordPress.com using their Manage/Import function. The creation dates of all posts must match, because they are part of the permalinks.
Remove duplicate content
Insert the following between the <head> and </head> tags:
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"/>
This line should instruct search engines to remove your old blog from their cache. The old content will cease to be as long as they are concerned. Therefore they are not going to penalize your new blog for duplicate content.
Optionally, display a message
This is not required, but a good idea anyway. Let your readers know you have moved on and that they are about to be redirected. Right after the <body> tag, insert this:
<div style='position: absolute; top: 30px; left: 30px; border: solid 2px #333; color: #000; background-color: yellow; padding: 5px; width: 400px; z-index: 5; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;'> <p><strong>My blog has moved!</strong></p> <p>You should be automatically redirected in 6 seconds. If not, visit<br/> <a href='http://yournewblog.wordpress.com/'> <strong>http://yournewblog.wordpress.com</strong></a> <br/> and update your bookmarks.</p> </div>
Well, now we are all set.
No related posts.
Tags: blogging