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.

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

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)

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!

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