2 Reasons You Must Keep Blogging at Your Old Blog When You Move to Another Domain
My blog has the moving shivers these days. I recently moved it from blogger to wordpress – and back again. It’s an ongoing saga that pains me because I have one more move to make.
I’ve given up free blogging platforms and have hired a professional team to design a new blog that will be hosted on my own domain. I’ve learned quite a few lessons in the process, which I wrote about in the piece entitled, 7 Things You Must Know Before Moving Your Blog. It’s a guest post that will appear on Meryl.net sometime in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, here is the number one lesson I’ve learned about moving a blog from one platform to another.
The #1 Thing You Need to Know When Moving Your Blog from One Platform to Another
Keep blogging at your old spot. Why? For two reasons.
Work out the kinks: As I discovered with my recent blog move, give yourself time to work out the kinks in your new blog. I was sailing along effortlessly for almost a month before my blog became inactive at wordpress. It’s been offline for three or four days now, and I don’t know if they’re ever going to allow it to go back up.
The gist of why my blog was taken offline is that I apparently broke some Terms of Service rule, but no one at wordpress has been able to tell me which one. So we’re in a back and forth email correspondence. It’s taking forever for them to respond, so I’m still waiting to see if they will let me back online.
I switched my blog over to wordpress on 4/30, so it hasn’t quite been a month. I kept blogging at my old spot, writing an excerpt at blogger and linking to the full post on wordpress.
In light of the problems, I immediately switched backed to blogger until my new site is up. It’s a pain and I’ve probably confused the heck out of my readers, but because I kept blogging at my old spot, at least a great majority of my readers have been able to find me.
Search Engine Traffic: What was my old blog spot gets about 3,600 visitors a day according to StatBrain.com (an excellent tool for judging true site traffic by the way). It also has a decent Alexa and PR ranking (if you put stock in such things).
These are the main reasons I kept blogging there. I didn’t want to lose my search engine juice until I’d been able to get my new site up and running and approaching these numbers and rankings.
This probably would have taken at least 6 months to a year, which means extra work for me, but I just didn’t know how else to keep the traffic from my old blog until my new blog was established.
FYI, if anyone has any advice on how to do this, please let me know (perhaps an article entitled How to Keep Your Traffic When You Transfer Your Site/Blog from a Free Platform (eg, Blogger)). I thought about domain forwarding, but as blogger is a free platform, I didn’t know if I could forward it to my new domain – and what effect it would have on my rankings.
Moving a blog affects so much. Take every measure to protect the hard work you’ve put in to date, and be sure to look for that upcoming article on Meryl.net. I go into great detail (about 1,200 words worth!) about how moving your blog affects your business – and how to keep down the headaches as much as possible.
Amanda Fazani | May 21st, 2008 at 1:43 pm #
Hello Yuwanda,
I’m glad to hear you managed to keep your Blogger blog going through your troubles with Wordpress. It must be quite upsetting for you to have your WP blog suspended during such an important phase in the life of your blog!
It is difficult to redirect pages from your Blogspot blog to a self-hosted (or indeed any other) blog. One solution would be to add a meta-redirect tag to your blog’s head section, but this can only serve to redirect readers landing on a page (any page) in your Blogger blog to the home page of your new blog.
There are two possible solutions for you to try and retain some of the blog-juice from your existing blog:
Firstly, you could set up a custom domain for your Blogger blog, and continue to use this as your main blog for at least three months (preferably six or more!). When you set up a custom domain, visitors to your blogspot.com pages will automatically be redirected to the same place on your custom domain (which is also hosted by blogger).
If you can do this for three months, chances are most of your readers will link to your custom domain URLs. Then eventually, you can set-up your self-hosted wordpress blog on the same domain, and use a URL redirect plugin to ensure all of your posts have the same URL string as your Blogger hosted posts. The switchover will be almost seamless, and you will still retain all the backlinks/authority generated from your Blogspot blog which you have generated over these few months of using a custom domain.
A faster solution would be to set up your WP blog on your own domain now, then replace your posts with a widget containing links and excerpts to your WP hosted posts.
I’ve noticed Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration used this method when transferring his popular blog from Blogger to a self-hosted WP blog (but even now, his original Blogger blog still ranks higher than the new Wp one!).
This method will be even more effective if you already redirect your feeds through Feedburner, in which case you can simply change the URL in your Feedburner dashboard to your new blog RSS URL and will not lose subscribers.
However, you may well lose out on Alexa, PR and other “blog-juice” resources for a good few months after this switch.
I hope one of these possibilities will be useful for you. I’m no expert when it comes to migrating from Blogger (as this is not something I plan to consider), but from what I’ve read of other blogs, these would probably seem the best options for you.
Good luck!
The Freelance Writer's Blog | May 21st, 2008 at 2:11 pm #
Amanda:
Thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed response. I appreciate that. I only understood about 50% of what you proposed, which is why I decided to hire professionals to handle it.
Thank you for confirming how long I need to blog at my old blog (you suggest six months), which I had planned to do anyway. I’ll probably be blogging at blogger for at least another year, so I’m glad to hear an “expert” second what I thought was best.
I’m anxious to have my blog off of free hosting sites, b/c I can’t fathom going through this again for any reason.
Again, thanks for the info. I’m going to link to mention that readers should read your comment here when I update my blog later on today.
Best,
Yuwanda
Zoobie Joy | May 21st, 2008 at 5:09 pm #
I agree..^^ It is still important to update your old blogs that way your old readers who were not informed about your new blog can still visit your site and can still be updated with what’s the latest buzz about you..^^
dental equipment leases | May 22nd, 2008 at 12:17 pm #
I am in the same boat in a way. I did not have a huge following on my old free hosted blog, but I had some. Trying not to lose those readers while I transfer over to a sel-hosted blog on my server is going to be a trick. But I am glad I am making the move. Self-hosted is the way to go to have more control over the whole process.
Andy Beard | May 22nd, 2008 at 2:58 pm #
I just saw this over on marketing pilgrim.
There isn’t really any reason to lose anything, though you might experience a bump, it is unlikely as you are already using a custom domain.
Just export to WP, with the same URL structure (to save messing around with 301 redirects)
Then use the domain mapping in Blogspot.
The only problem is that humans will see an interstitial page from Google if they visit a blogspot URL with a link to click - they spiders pass straight through and you don’t lose juice.
You will lose Technorati links counts.
I did it on my blog over 18 months ago, before domain mapping was an option. With some javascript and meta redirects on one end, and some clever PHP code I found on the other, visitors always ended up at the correct link for everything other than posts on blogspot where I had changed the title, and it messed up the resulting WP page slugs
Don’t forget a 301 redirect on the feeds
If you have problems with 301 redirects, look for the redirection plugin from the same author as Headspace 2 (also great)
The Freelance Writer's Blog | May 22nd, 2008 at 8:24 pm #
@Andy, my response to your post is . . . huh?
I so appreciate you taking the time to give me such an in-depth explanation, but I’m afraid that it went right over my head. I’m no techie, you lost me when you got beyond 301 redirects.
It’s okay though, I’m back at blogger now and am having my new blog designed and it will be hosted on my own domain, so it’s all good.
Again, thank your for such an exhaustive explanation. That was really nice of you.
Yuwanda
Andy Beard | May 22nd, 2008 at 9:04 pm #
As an example Kevin is more of a code monkey than I am, I am sure he can easily help out, and if there isn’t a suitable article already written here on the blog, I am sure it is easy to find one that explains each of those steps in more detail.
The end results should always be that you type in an old url on blogspot, and you end up on the corresponding page on your new domain, running on Wordpress, and don’t lose any Google juice whatsoever, though you might have a visible grey bar for a while, your traffic will generally remain.
The hardest part you will find are the cluttered search results full of tutorials on how to move from blogger to Wordpress, and less than half of them were a “good” method even at the time they were written.
Floral Rug | May 25th, 2008 at 1:54 pm #
Can never stop blogging at the old blog..people need time to adjust..