I have finally got my redirects from blogspot working perfectly.
Well almost…
It is not as good as a 301 redirect, as it will not transfer pagerank.
There is also a bug I found which means I will have to go through my imported content carefully checking page slugs.
It will however transfer traffic from my old domain to my new domain, directly to the content they are looking for. My old site used to pick up a fair amount of traffic from various search engines.
The code I am using for the redirects can be found at:-
Moving from Blogger to WordPress: Best Practices
Watch out for the default location in the code “/blog/”, as if you are installing Wordpress in the root domain, you might have to make additional changes.
Lets see it in action…
One of my most popular posts on my old blog was
Submit Articles – 3 Killer products (at niche-website.blogspot.com )
This now redirects to the relevant page on this domain
Submit Articles – 3 Killer Products (on this domain)
I actually found a bug, though it might be either a blogspot one, or a Wordpress import bug. For some reason the above article when it was imported, was imported with “-extended” in the page slug.
Wordpress behaves correctly for normal articles, as if you change the title of a post, it doesn’t change the page slug unless you do it manually.
Blogspot seems to also behave correctly, because a page with “-extended” doesn’t exist, and the original page before the title was changed does exist.
Thus it is my belief that the current Wordpress Import from blogger is somehow “asuming” that page slugs should be taken from page titles on Blogspot, and creates its own slugs based upon the titles, not the actually pages used.
Maybe it is a limitation on the data Blogger can provide for Wordpress to import the posts, but it is a bug from a users perspective. It won’t show up frequently, because not many blogger users will change a post title after it has been posted… maybe
The work around is to check your page slugs compared to your old blog, and test every redirect. The best place to do that is from within the Edit Posts section of Blogger, and to CTRL click “View” to open each page in a new tab.
One Comment
Andy, who did you have to bribe to get a 301 on that url!
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[...] Google following meta redirects Related tags:301 redirect google meta redirect moving website niche website niche websites redirect search engine optimization seoI have previously documented how I moved my old blog from http://niche-website.blogspot.com to this domain http://andybeard.eu [...]