Final Issues: Moving Blogger to WordPress with Your Own Domain Name
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In parts one and two, we set the custom domain to 301 redirect Blogger post URLs to a new domain name. Then we transferred the files to the new web host and changed the name servers. Up to this stage, the setup is fine; however, there are still a lot of issues that could affect your site ranking and traffic. We will cover them in this final part of our three-part series.
Here is a list of the issues which cause the most concern:
- Some of the URLs may give a 404 status because of some URL incompatibility issues.
- Old links pointing to Blogspot URLs instead of the new one can possibly create canonical issues.
- Google webmaster and analytics code needs to be updated.
Let's start talking about possible solutions for dealing with those last issues.
Correcting the 404 issue using .htaccess
This problem is the result of URL incompatibilities between Blogger custom domain URLs and the WordPress permalink structure. At first it may be hard to notice until you see the difference when you are about to click a link coming from the search result.
To illustrate, say this is the URL currently indexed by Google:
http://www.coolalieninthesky.com/2009/06/this-is-freesuperweapons.html
However, after implementing the WordPress permalink (which will rewrite the URLS), this particular post will become:
http://www.coolalieninthesky.com/2009/06/this-is-a-freesuperweapons.html
This is just an example but it could happen to you; the URL in the Google index may not be absolutely the same as the one generated by WordPress's permalinks. Another possible scenario is that you use the custom structure: /%postname%/ instead of /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html, which will drastically change the URLs after exporting to WordPress from Blogger.
To correct this problem, you need to extract all URLs in the Google index. These URLs are generated by Blogger, but use your custom domain. Of course, extracting URLs one by one from the search results takes a lot of time; however I have written a tutorial on how to save some time in doing this.
The next thing you will do is extract all the URLs used by your WordPress blog. You can use Xenu sleuth to crawl all the URLs in your blog and follow some importing tips to MS Excel.
Once you have data for each set (one indexed by Google and the other used by WordPress), you will need to pair the old and new URLs, as shown in the screen shot below:
It is obvious the URLs used by the custom domain and the new WordPress permalink structure are not the same. When the name servers of your domain are changed to point to your new web host, those old custom domain-Blogger URLs will now lead to a 404 header status.
To preserve traffic, rankings and link juices earned, we need to 301 redirect all of those old URLs to the new URLs. To accomplish that, download the .htaccess located at the root directory of your WordPress website to your desktop.
Next: 301 Redirection with .htaccess >>
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