How to make a clean break without getting lost?

April 14, 2009 8:34 PM

How can I migrate my blog to a new domain without upsetting its Google ranking or breaking third party links?

I've been running a blog on the Blogger service for the last year or so. In that time, numerous other publications (electronic and print) have linked/referred to the blog. Some may have linked to particular articles, but I'm less concerned about these links.

I am giving the site a facelift which includes moving it off of Blogger to its own domain. Is it possible to do this without upsetting the sites ranking in Google or breaking links from third parties? I do not want to have to start over in terms of my Google ranking. I would appreciate any advice on how to best accomplish this migration with those two goals in mind.

posted by pantheON to technology (7 comments total)

301 redirect is what you are looking for.
posted by furtive at 8:44 PM on April 14

I don't think you can set up a 301 from blogger?
But what you can do is tell blogger that you want to have an externally hosted blog, set it up to point to some random directory on your new domain and then .htaccess that shit to go back to your /
You'll still probably lose your page rank, though.
posted by TimeDoctor at 9:00 PM on April 14

If you switch to a custom domain (rather than publishing by FTP), Blogger will take care of all the 301 redirects. Your page rank won't suffer and no links will be broken. I've done this a couple of times, and it worked perfectly.
posted by Knappster at 11:01 PM on April 14

Are you moving platforms as well? If you are still going to use Blogger then Knappster's link is what you need, but if you are moving to Wordpress then this is helpful, and it also links to other resources on moving from Blogger to Wordpress:

Blogger Sucks. Wanna Move to WordPress?
posted by imabanana at 11:23 PM on April 14

I neglected to mention that I'll be moving to WordPress. imabanana is right on the money.
posted by pantheON at 7:38 AM on April 15

Upon further reading, imabanana's advises to simply start over with the page ranking. Not the best solution.
posted by pantheON at 7:44 AM on April 15

I actually think there's not going to be a perfect solution for this, but this might also help:

Moving from Blogger to WordPress: Best Practices

The problem is that Blogger doesn't give you access to the server to do a proper 301 redirect, but you can minimize the damage as much as possible with the above.
posted by imabanana at 1:09 PM on April 15