The Best Way to move from Blogger Beta to WordPress

Posted on June 24, 2007 at 8:25 pm

This guide is for those people who have finally decided that they want to make the jump from the Blogger platform to the more professional and flexible WordPress platform. In the Blogger vs WordPress battle, there are way too many reasons to move to WordPress for me to list here, but you can read a couple of good posts from some other happy WordPress bloggers here:

1. http://jayajha.wordpress.com/2005/09/27/bloggercom-vs-wordpresscom/ - Gives a good comparison of both blogging platforms with negatives and positives of each.

2. http://bambit.kusangpalo.com/?p=71 - Quite the happy WordPress blogger!

3. http://www.blogtrepreneur.com/2006/03/13/battle-of-the-blogs-blogger-vs-wordpress/ - Another point by point comparison where WordPress wins!

From my own personal experience, I have to say that the best thing that I like about WordPress is the fact that it allow developers to create plugins that enhance the platform significantly. Actually, if it were not for the plugins, I would not have switched to WordPress. Blogger Beta currently only has about 10 to 12 widgets that you can add to your blog; however, with WordPress there are hundreds of plugins.

Using the plugins, you can make your blogging life a million times easier. For example, Google puts a lot of weight on the internal link structure of your site, so it’s essential to do things like link to other related posts at the bottom of each post. In Blogger, you have to do this manually: find the related posts, create the links, and go back to the post to put the links in. On the other hand, WordPress has a plugin called Related Posts which uses MySQL’s full text search capabilities to find almost perfectly related posts automatically! I used to spend almost an extra 5 to 10 minutes on each post manually adding links, which takes away from your real goal of blogging. On top of that, being a human, I missed a lot of entries that the plugin finds!

Anyway, getting to the point of this post, what is the best way to switch over from Blogger to WordPress? This is actually a fairly tough question with a couple of different paths. You might have read elsewhere that you can simply import your entire blog from Blogger into WordPress and within a few minutes start on your jolly good way! And that is actually true, but if you do that and nothing else, your blog will lose all of it’s traffic, end up in Google’s supplemental index, and die a miserable death.

So why is that? Let’s say you have written about 500 posts in Blogger and now you decide you want to switch over to WordPress. That means it’s been around for a while and your site has probably already been indexed by Google. So all of your pages are in their main index. When you import all your posts into WordPress, you now have your original blog and your new blog, both with the same content. Google will crawl your new site and looks at it’s current cache to see if there is something very similar already in it’s cache. It will of course find the exact same content and will put your entire new site into it’s supplemental index because of the duplicate content. The supplemental index can be debated whether it is bad for your site or not, but it’s definitely not in the main index and that’s where you want your site to be. You can see which pages in your site are in the supplemental index by typing “site:www.mysite.com” into Google search. If you see “Supplemental Result” in green next to the URL of the site, that page is in the supplemental index.

So the obvious answer is to simply delete the blog right after importing the posts into WordPress right? WRONG! If you delete the Blogger blog, the Google bot will crawl your site and get a 404 error for that page and it will simply KEEP what it has in it’s cache. It does not believe in deleting content from it’s index. So even if you delete the blog completely, you’ll still get tagged with the duplicate content penalty since your site will remain in Google’s cache.

There are two ways around this: 1) Redirect your blog and every post automatically to it’s corresponding location in the new blog or 2) Get your original site out of the Google index completely and then allow Google to index your new site. There are of course advantages and disadvantages to both. Hands down, the best solution is to redirect your blog to the new one. The reason for this is that your Google juice (the PageRank you had developed on the main page of your old site and the inner pages) will get transferred over to the new site.

However, Blogger does not support this and there is some code I managed to find written by someone that tries to do this for you, but unfortunately it does not work perfectly. And from what I have read, it is quite essential to have each page redirect to the appropriate page in the new site. Simply redirecting everything to the main page on your new site will get you into the same trouble as before.

If your site has a PR of 5, 6 or higher, you may want to simply stay with Blogger. It might not be worth the lost traffic and lost AdSense reveune to switch. But if you’re like me, just starting out with only a couple of hundred posts and a PR of 4 or lower, then the fantasies of WordPress might just be worth it! If you simply must move from Blogger and you don’t want to lose your PR, then check out these links and see if you can use some tech savvy skills to get the redirect code to work perfectly!

http://www.techcounter.com/?p=47&cp=2#comments

http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/05/move-blogger-to-wordpress

Ok, now on the the second method! Note that the second method does not take into account retaining your PageRank! Unfortunately, it will be lost in the process. But from what I’ve read and heard from other bloggers who have made the move, your PageRank and traffic will come back quickly once your site is indexed. It might take a couple of months, but it will eventually come back. That kind of patience might be ok for some, but not for others, so choose your method carefully or don’t move at all!

The second method basically is to edit the template of your Blogger blog so that for each and every one of your posts only the skeleton of the post is left with no content, then a META tag is added to the main template that tells Google not to index the page, and finally you use the Google URL removal tool to remove each post individually from the index. If this sounds like a good amount of work, then you’re right. It’s not terrible bad if you have 200 to 400 posts, but if you have a significantly larger number of posts, then it will be a pain to submit each post URL for removal.

Firstly, you want to switch your Blogger blog to the old Blogger template. You can do that by going into the Edit HTML section in your Blogger blog and choosing Revert to Classic Template. Then you want to remove all of the code between the <Blogger> and </Blogger> tags, leaving just those two tags.

Then you want to add the line <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> section in the template. Then you want to create an account for Google’s Automatic URL Remover tool and then choose Individual URLs: web pages, images, or other files after you click New Removal Request.

This method of removal is from the Blogger team itself and this is how I removed all of my pages from the Google index. The information is listed under How to Delete A Blog in the archives. You have to scroll down about half way down on the page. Within a few days, most of my pages were removed. The nice thing about this method is that it’s very fast and all of your posts are still in Blogger so you don’t have to import everything into WordPress before doing this. All you’re doing is deleting the code that shows your posts on the web site, it does not actually delete your posts from Blogger.

A third method you can use to get your blog out of Google’s index is to delete all of your posts, create a stub post, and then wait a few weeks or months and let Google replace it’s cache with just the stub post. This method of deleting a blog is outlined in an article written by a Blogger user. This method is in the context of deleting a blog so that sploggers (Spam Bloggers) can’t use it again, but it also works in our scenario.

I hope this helps someone in there move from Blogger to WordPress. If you have any questions and comments, please feel free to speak your mind! This may not be the best way, so any updates would be greatly appreciated. I guess the main lesson is to make sure you don’t simply delete your old blog. You either want to redirect it or get it out of the Google cache! Enjoy!

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6 Responses to “The Best Way to move from Blogger Beta to WordPress”

Blog Bloke said on : February 19th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

I’ve discovered the perfect way to move your Blogger blog over to Wordpress, automatically redirect your old posts and not lose your pagerank either.

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