Moving a Blog from Blogger to Wordpress

I left a comment on Lead-Gen SEO yesterday about moving a blog from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress and I thought the information should be shared here on my blog.

I’ve moved several blogs with this method and it works pretty well, although there’s no way that I know of that will preserve all of the backlinks to your blog.

The bottom line: avoid having to move by setting up your blog on your own domain and don’t bother with a blog at Blogger or Wordpress.com.  It’s a little more work to get started but it’ll save you a lot of headaches and linkjuice down the road.

This is the basic process I use:

1. Buy your domain name, get it set up with a hosting company, and upload the WordPress files to the domain. When you go through the initial blog setup, turn off indexing so your blog won’t get spidered by Google and other search engines.

2. Import the Blogger blog to the new WP blog (there’s an option within the WP control panel under “Tools”, you don’t even need to download anything.

3. Clean up the formatting of the new WP posts. This can be a real pain for blogs with a ton of posts because WP unfortunately picks up a lot of funky Blogger style tags. You can do this by going into each post and looking at the HTML/code view of the post.

You also have to make sure that the images transferred properly and that they’re being linked to their new locations on your domain, and not still pointing to where they were hosted on Blogger. Ditto for video embeds; sometimes Blogger uses its own player to embed video so you have to make sure they’re pointing to Youtube or wherever, instead of back to the old blog.

4. Write a post on the Blogger blog that the site is moving and people should update their bookmarks/RSS feeds.

4. Once the new blog is set up, you can do a 302 redirect from Blogger to the new domain (using JavaScript – http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/05/move-blogger-to-wordpress).

5. Turn indexing back on in WP. Use the Sitemap generator plugin to create a sitemap for the new domain and submit it to Google and Bing webmaster tools.

6. Transfer the RSS feed.. this is easier if you’re using FeedBurner. If you’re not using FeedBurner, then you can ask your current subscribers to switch over to the new RSS feed. You’ll probably lose some subscribers in the process.

6. I leave the 302 up and running for a few weeks while the new blog gets indexed. During this time you should be reminding people to subscribe to the new feed and update their bookmarks. I also email any bloggers or sites with inbound links to the Blogger domain and ask them to update their links to the new domain.

7. After your new domain is indexed and working properly, shut off the 302 redirect, write a post on Blogger that the domain has moved, and add a “NoIndex” META to the template header in blogger so you can avoid duplicate content issues. Another option is to delete all of the data on the Blogger blog, except for a “This Blog has Moved” post that includes a link to your new blog.

It’s not a perfect solution and you’ll still get people showing up at the old blog but it’s probably better in the long-run to be on your own domain. Maybe someday Blogger will allow for 301 redirects but until then…