How to Move from Blogger to WordPress Using Your Own Domain Name - Recommended strategy for moving
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This section outlines the correct moving strategy and its associated requirements. This needs careful planning to preserve the most vital components for website or blog profitability -- namely the total traffic for the website or blog, and the search engine rankings for the main page as well as for specific blog posts.
Step # 1: Set up a custom domain name for your blog at http://www.blogger.com
Before you transfer any content to your new domain name (hopefully to be powered with WordPress), I recommend using a custom domain name first as a method of publishing content in Blogger.
So assuming you're old blog is named "coolalieninthesky.blogspot.com," and you would like the new WordPress blog to be named coolalieninthesky.com (just an example), what you will do is:
- First, register the domain name coolalieninthesky.com (there are lot of registrars, such as Godaddy.com or Networksolutions.com).
- Second, edit the CNAME record of your domain name to point it to Blogger. In this case they are using: ghs.google.com , check out the instructions.
- Once it is done, go to your Blogger Dashboard -> Settings -> Publishing -> and then click on switch to "custom domain."
- After this, click on "Switch to Advanced settings" beside "Already own a domain?"
- In the box, type the www version of your domain. So in our example, it will be: www.coolalieninthesky.com. Also, tick the box that says redirect non-www to www version, as that will help also.
Wait a couple of hours and you will see that your old blog, for example coolalieninthesky.blogspot.com, will be 301 redirected to www.coolalieninthesky.com
Let this stay and stabilize for a couple of weeks (at most a month). This will change those URLs in the Google index from your old blogspot URL to the new URL using your custom domain name. For example:
http://coolalieninthesky.blogspot.com/2009/06/freesuperweapons.html will be change to: http://www.coolalieninthesky.com/2009/06/freesuperweapons.html , in the Google index.
Expect a very minor drop in traffic and rankings during this time; this won't be a major problem if the redirection and DNS setup are correct.
Luckily, you will be pleasantly surprised to see that your new URLs will now be ranking in search engines, replacing the old Blogspot post URLs. This means that all link juices, page rank and other URL properties are now transferred to your new domain name URLS because of the 301 redirect. They will now rank too, replacing old URLs.
And if all those URLS are changed by Google and reflected in its index, it is now the time to proceed to step 2.
Next: Importing the blog into WordPress >>
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