RutSum

Migration from Blogger to Wordpress

Shifting certainly hasn’t been easy. You lose quite a lot of things while shifting, the most important thing being traffic. Here are some of the tools that made the process much easier than it would be for others, who did most of the things manually.

1) Blogger Custom Domain Settings - With the Blogger publishing settings, it’s easy to redirect your old blogger domain to the new one. If you already have a domain and have pointed it to your new self-hosted blog, just enter the new domain URL in your Blogger settings, under advanced settings. It’s as easy as that.

2) Wordpress content importer - Wordpress supports importing posts and comments from a variety of publishing platforms, such as Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type and TypePad. For Blogger, you just need to grant access to your Google account to Wordpress, so that it can retrieve content through the Blogger RSS. This also means that if you have set any RSS footer content in Blogger, it will appear in posts in your new Wordpress blog. If you don’t want this, be sure to remove any RSS footer content in Blogger.

3) Blogger Redirector - A wonderful Wordpress plugin, created by Sam Wong. It can be downloaded over here. The installation is easy, just upload it to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory, and activate it from the WP admin panel.
Now here’s the magic. This plugin redirects all your old Blogger post links to your new Wordpress post links. For this, you obviously have to complete step 1, that is redirection from Blogger to the new domain. After you’ve done both step 1 and 3, here’s what happens.

* When somebody accesses http://rutsum.blogspot.com/2007/07/pclinuxos-2007.html, Blogger redirects it to http://rutsum.com/2007/07/pclinuxos-2007.html. This is a 301 redirect (which means permanently moved), so search engines come to know that the content has been relocated, Google transfers the PageRank accordingly. Though this may take some time.

* Now the Blogger Redirector plugin redirects http://rutsum.com/2007/07/pclinuxos-2007.html to http://rutsum.com/pclinuxos-2007/, based on string search or maybe some other heuristic method, just guessing.

This redirect is very, very accurate, but it’s limitation is that currently it works only for post pages and RSS and ATOM feed URLs. The archive and other pages have not been included, and will redirect to a 404 page. Also, this too is a 301 redirect, so PageRank from even your post links is transferred.

These steps should be more than enough to completely shift your Blogger blog to Wordpress. This ensures that you retain the maximum amount of your traffic, and so that migration doesn’t become a nightmare.

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