The Network under the Bright-Bright Sky

Finally it comes to time to setup my own Blog/CMS, and I picked WordPress, and moving my http://sam0737.blogspot.com/ to here. The problem is, for my old blog on Blogspot by Blogger, how should I move the posts and comments? What if people visit the my Blogspot? How could I preserve the permalinks? Could I also transfer the PageRank that I built up in Google?

WordPress v2.x has an blog importing tool. It would only solve the first problem, however.

The walk-through here will also work in case you are moving from Blogger that used your own domain name but not from Blogspot.

Luckily, with the flexibility provided by WordPress framework, there are solutions for all the questions! I will use my own story as an example below, my original Blogspot was on http://sam0737.blogspot.com/, and now I want to migrate to the WordPress on http://hellosam.net/.

Importing posts from Blogger

http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content#Blogger has already plotted out how one could import the data from Blogger. Basically, just follow the on-screen instruction from the admin panel and you are all good.

Actually not quite…Because the imported tags will appears as categories here, you might want convert them back to tags in WordPress. It can be fixed easily, you will find the conversion tool “category to tag converter” under “Manage, Categories”

Redirect the people, keep the permalinks

And this is what everyone wants to know, right? The problem is that there are zillions of links and trackbacks pointed to our blog already, and it’s impossible to notify all of them, let’s not mention how we could expect them to update. On the other hand, the search engines would take a long time to re-crawl and update their database. To minimize the impact to traffic, we have to do something.

First, Blogger allows you to park your very own domain on their Blogspot service. Although the design of this feature is to point the DNS CNAME record to their Blogspot server, which is not quite the same in our case; The main point is that we would be benefits from the auto redirection comes with this feature—When enabled, it will redirects everything under http://sam0737.blogspot.com/ to http://hellosam.net/.

Before you enable this handy feature, let’s make sure our http://hellosam.net/ could accept the Blogspot’s permalinks format.

Luckily, the WordPress importing tools we just used will preserve the Blogspot’s permalinks information, and we could do something about it. The answer is to hack the .htaccess…At this point of writing, I just discovery why don’t me come up with much cleaner solution with Plugin, and publicizing it? So I did and created Blogger Redirector. It could auto-detect the redirection from http://sam0737.blogspot.com/ permalinks, and redirect the users to the new and correct URL on http://hellosam.net/!

After installing Blogger Redirector, let’s go back to the Blogger and plug our domain in. Go to the Blog’s Settings page after login, you will find the options under Publishing tab. We want to turn on the Advance settings here, telling Blogger that we have own a domain and want to use it on their service. If you have configured it correctly, open a new browser and point to http://sam0737.blogspot.com/, it should be redirected to http://hellosam.net/ by now. Cool!

How about Google’s PageRank?

I have heard that if the redirection is done using “HTTP 301 (Moved Permanently)”, most search engines will understand what’s going on, including the Google’s PageRank.

After hooking the domain to Blogger, all the HTTP requests pointed to http://sam0737.blogspot.com/ will be redirected to http://hellosam.net/ by Blogger server using HTTP 301. And on this side, when the Blogger Redirector detected the incoming Blogspot’s permalink request, it will also use HTTP 301 to redirect to the new and updated permalinks on http://hellosam.net/. All in all, the puzzle is completed and finished.

Like this guide and plugin? Please consider supporting it.

Update

It looks like Blogger won’t do a HTTP 301 for redirection now, it uses an plain HTML to lead the user instead. In other words, there is no way to safely transfer the PageRank.

Good thing is that the plugin still could rewrite the Blogger’s styled URL to WordPress format, correctly redirecting the users to destinated WordPress page.

Wrap up

Now with the helps from WordPress importing tools, Blogger’s custom domain hook-up and Blogger Redirector plugin, the posts, comments and permalinks on http://sam0737.blogspot.com/ has been completed redirected to http://hellosam.net/. Now we might try to search “site:sam0737.blogspot.com” on Google, happily finding out that everything old links just work as it should. It surely does reduce the inconvenience and confusion caused to visitors to minimum.

If you have any questions to me, please raise it below. I hope you will have a happy time migrating your blog.

Entry was posted on 2 January 2008 at 4:23.
Tags projects, tech | Category Blogger Redirector (WordPress), Announcements

Comment | Commends and pings OK