Making That Shift from Blogger to WordPress
“What was your biggest ‘blogging’ mistake ?” - put this question to anyone who has a blog hosted on Blogger and you’ll almost get a unanimous reply - they wish they had started on a personal web domain (like myblog.com) instead of sub-domains like blogspot.com or wordpress.com.
I too made that mistake when I launched Digital Inspiration on labnol.blogspot.com some three years ago. When that blog started getting some attention, I considered moving to self-hosted WordPress several times but the fear of losing search traffic, Google PageRank and RSS subscribers would hold me back.
But this year, I tried a little different approach and it worked - now Digital Inspiration is located at www.labnol.org and there’s no dip in search rankings, organic site traffic and the RSS subscriber count. Here’s that very secret recipe explained in 10 easy steps:
Step 1: Registered a web domain www.labnol.org through Google Apps - the advantages were private domain registration, free email powered by Gmail and some very decent hosting space through Google Pages.
Step 2: Created an About Me page, uploaded it to Google Pages (root directory) and modified my Blogger template to link to this page instead of the the default blogger.com profile page.
Step 3: Created a new site search page powered by Google Custom Search Engine and uploaded it to Google Page Creator again. You’ll know the advantage in the next step.
Step 4: Then I added MyBlogLog tracking code to all pages of my blogspot blog. This really helped in giving some more Google Juice to the “still young” labnol.org domain. Here’s why:
When people come to your blog, they are very interested in reading your profile page and they also search your blog archives. Since my profile page and site search was both located on labnol.org, they started appearing under “Hot Clicks in My Communities” section of MyBlogLog members who had joined the the DI community.
Google bot indexes MyBlogLog pages and therefore, just those two links helped bring lot of Google Juice for the my new site which was still very much a “baby”.
Step 5: In just a couple of months, the Google page rank of that new site was 6. I then signed up with DreamHost for web hosting since Google Pages would only offer limited bandwidth.
Step 6: I launched a couple of new project like AdSense Sandbox, ASCII Art and India Blogs that were very well received in the blogging community - that helped in improving the trust level of the new domain among search engines and avoiding the Google SandBox Effect.
Step 7: While most of my RSS subscribes were using the new FeedBurner feed, the default Blogger XML feed too had some subscriptions. Luckily, Google introduced Feed Redirect service this year and that brought all my RSS subscribers on the same FeedBurner platform [faq].
Step 8: It was now time to install the WordPress package on www.labnol.org. Then I created a new WordPress Theme from scratch that was an exact replica of my existing Blogger Template - the site width, AdSense placement, CSS formatting, header images, and everything else looked just like a mirror copy.
Step 9: Finally, I started writing new blog posts on the labnol.org domain and modified the FeedBurner feed to point to the new WordPress feed. So that shift from Blogger to WordPress was completely transparent for existing RSS subscribers.
Step 10: I manually update the front page of my blogspot website each time there’s a new post on labnol.org so that regular visitors who come via bookmarks don’t miss anything.
Other less interesting details and experiences:
1. I was worried that because of the new website, my entire Google Account could fall a victim of AdSense Smart Pricing. Fortunately, that never happened.
2. The traffic on old blogspot site is around 45k page views per day while the new labnol.org site get around 10k hits per day - I think this is fairly decent considering the amount of content and age of the new website.
3. After moving to WordPress, my blog posts get lot of traffic from StumbleUpon and Digg which is surprising.
4. The growth in the number of RSS subscribers has accelerated after moving from Blogger to WordPress. Probably that “blogspot” term in the URL was a stumbling factor and make a site look less professional.
5. The site definitely gets more attention from advertisers on BlogAds and Adify - TechDispenser & Washington Post BlogRoll program.
6. I had to print a new set of business cards that do not say blogspot anymore.
7. The new site also helps in bringing traffic to the older blogspot blog because both share a common search engine.
8: All the old stories still reside on blogspot and I have no plans of moving them to WordPress through Blogger Importer - reason being Google Juice.
Should you have any questions or suggestion, please add them in the comments. Thanks.
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Amit
I made the move from Blogspot to my own domain recently, but without all the clever planning you relate in your excellent post. Until I read it, I was honestly contemplating reverting.
However, permit me to ask a question: now that Google has introduced New Blogger Custom Domain, is the move to Wordpress still a good idea?
As I understand it, Google allows you to register your own domain name so that you can have a URL which is your own property, not a sub-domain of Blogger, and also host it for free.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
CP
Amit,
Great article.
I’m a little confused over a couple of points.
You Say you Created the Domain with Google but you cannot host with Google can you? Who do you host with now and why did you register your domain with Google. What benefits are there?
Excellent article. I also moved from Blogger to wordpress nearly 2 years back and it has a dramatic effect on your branding. All the best for your errr… new blog. :-)
simply marvellous ! Simply Amit ! and Simply Labnol ! Great post !
A few months after starting a blog on blogspot, I signed up for a custom domain and got rid of the .blogspot.com part of my URL. This made a huge difference in StumbleUpon traffic, and I think it helped my search rankings as well.
I’m still using Blogger, and Google is still hosting my blog. All I paid for was domain registration, but having a xxx.com URL instead of a xxx.blogspot.com URL has made a huge difference for me.
Hi Amit, cool entry
one question
I’m currently on .blogspot subdomain
My blog offers templates and has a good amount of back links towards it
Is it wise to leave the .blogspot sub domain and publish a post regarding the shift or to establish a redirect that will redirect the SE (precisely Google) Juice to the new domain?
Plus, what should be ideal age of domain to be Google Friendly?
Thanks!
well, you can redirect the people coming on your blogspot blog to this blog, so you wont have to update in more than one place & still not loose visitors. :)
with time, this domain will pickup its importance in SERPs. also, you can import your older entries from blogger here, this doesnt mean that they will be deleted from the blogspot blog. you can keep them there as well. :)
I had noticed the redirection and was planning on asking you how you did it. Very smartly handled and must say, it shows the extent of planning.
Re: no.8, doesn’t the content at two location create duplicate content issues?
Hello Amit,
I recently moved a complete Blogger blog over to a self hosted Wordpress without losing any subscriber and virtually no traffic. The reason for the move were the limitations of Blogger. While I love the platform, the simplicity and the (very low) costs, WP simply has some attractions that Blogger can’t match.
Anyway, my Blogger blog did use a custom domain. Still I was able to upload Wordpress to the root of my domain without this affecting the Blogger hosted blog. I moved all of my posts over using the import tool, and redirected feeds through Feedburner. Finally, I changed all WP blog posts to use “pretty urls”, which match the Blogger URLS virtually 99% of the time. Then simply let go of the custom domain from Blogspot and Voila! All traffic, feeds and such can then visit the Wordpress hosted blog instead!
This is a good tutorial though. I can understand why many would now choose to stay with Blogger for the custom domain. Indeed my main blog is still hosted by Google, and the juice is in no way affected by my choice of host!
Wishing you all the best of luck for your blog. You write great posts and I’m always looking for more :)
Very interesting article on how you moved your site to the new domain.
Did you ever try moving a domain without all these tricks but equally interesting content and see what happened… now that would make the steps worthwhile, would it not :)
Dear God of Indian Bloggers,
The stuff you describe might be useful for people like you who get 55K hits per day.
Probably might hit techmeme too. (already?)
But for us novices, the simpler methods we use might be better.
@Chris - The problem with moving from Blogspot to Google Custom Domain is the same as moving to WordPress. You lose all the Google juice because the URLs change. But yes, for a new blogger, Custom domains are the way to go.
@James - Google offers very limited web hosting space and this site is now on DreamHost. The best benefit of registering domain with Google is free Gmail. You could also upgrade to Google Apps Premier and get lot of extra stuff.
@PC - Thanks though unlike you, I have not moved my archives to WordPress.
@Brad - You definitely made an excellent decision at the right time.
@Ashwini - Google doesn’t offer you access to the .htaccess file of blogspot so you can do a manual 301 redirect. Regarding age, I would say it depends more on the number of incoming links.
@Amit-Gupta - It may not be a good idea to have the same content on WordPress and Blogspot because Search engines take duplicate content issues seriously.
@Patrix - Agree.
@Amanda - Can’t agree more, Blogger is an excellent platform and they keep improving but yes, there are some limitations. I liked the way you managed your move.
@Peeyush - Wish I could experiment but since this blog is my sole bread-earner, I wanted to play safe.
@Amit,
I already guessed it before when you started linking articles to India Inc. and then feed redirection. Now, since India Inc. has multiple authors, I hope it will make to Google news someday.
I would like to request you to open up comment feed for labnol.blogspot.com It might help readers to subscribe to comments to know which post is getting more attention or to subscribe to a particluar post comments to get updates.
I had myself noticed that you were trying to shift from Blogger to Wordpress and was doing that gradually.
Now my question is
Does Wordpress (on your own site) has more advantages than Google Custom Domain
The one advantage is that the Categories and Sub Categories are included in the URL. Is there any other advantages.
For Example, I have started this site tngda.in on Google Custom Domain. This is a new site. Shall I continue with this or should I install Wordpress in tngda.in. Please give your advice
Actually i was wondering for this article online.I got it here.Well !! I found your blogspot is not updated manually today. Amit ,why don’t you use feed burner “Buzz boost” to upload your posts on blogspot automatically.It just need fraction of seconds you know.But default buzz boost has limitations to 100 words .I think it is possible to edit css style sheet to add more words and images.Have a try…
Oh !! I’m sorry.To be clear..it is
Feed Burenr’s ” Buzz Boost”
Hi Amit,
Looks like you now have the best of both worlds - continuing on Blogspot and a new site in Wordpress!
Wish you all the best.
P.S. This was not too clear for me :
“Google bot indexes MyBlogLog pages and therefore, just those two links helped bring lot of Google Juice for the my new site which was still very much a “baby”.”
as the MyBlogLog code is in Javascript.
Bruno - Depends, if all you want is a blog on a personal web domain, Blogger with Custom Domain is perfect since it won’t ask you to know about the tech stuff.
MyMytri - Yes, I could use these RSS “gadgets” to automatically republish my new content on the blogspot site but the problem is that they are all written in JS - so Search engine bots would ignore that.
Vin - The MyBlogLog widget for blogs in in Javascript but what the “Hot clicks” section on the main MBL site is regular HTML.,
Hmm. This kind of post is why you have that wonderful upgoing graphs above. I still think that you are still with Blogger if not for this post. 2 thumbs for making this process completely transparent to end users. Very smooth transition indeed.
Thank you Amit.
You’ve saved me a lot of time and trouble - I was just about to start blogging using Blogger but now I’ll start on Wordpress…
Your blog is named digital inspiration not labnol so why did you buy labnol.org instead of something more apt like digitalinspiration.org?
Hiii , Amit
nice tut
I have a blog(wiktech.blogspot.com) with PR2(Which is still ruunning ofcourse) but now i have got myself a new domain(breathacker.com)
how do i do a redirect with all the post and trafiic intact , sorry didnt get it clear in the tut since my domain name is from another source and not Google :(
Amit,
Very interesting article. The article along with the comments is a very valueable resource for people looking to increase their knowledge about the insides of blogging. I have never worked on wordpress but after this I am starting to explore it and its advantages compared to using blogger. I use blogger currently but my blog is hosted on my own domain but still this is very useful resource for me.
thanks
Thanks Amit for helping new bloggers.
I did same mistake year ago but was fortunate that I moved my all blogs to Wordpress quite early. I mad complete move to new own domains and there was no fear of losing subscribers in initial stages.
So I advice those who are serious in blogging should start with own domain on wordpress.
I moved my blog to my own domain via Blogger in March. However, what was Blogger’s advantage at point now appears as a limitation. That is, the availability of new templates. Blogger provides just a handful(so does WP ) but then there are so many new ones coming out on WP, not so many on Blogger. While I remain happy about Blogger on my domain, the template bit I feel leaves something for Google to work on.
@Amit Agarwal:
well, search engines do penalise but all the instances I’ve seen have been when the same content was on multiple domains. haven’t seen SEs penalising if the content is on just 2-3 domains, there are a lot of people out there who’ve switched to wordpress from blogger while keeping their old archives on old blog but also importing it in wordpress so their readers can search(using wp’s default) & also read all stuff at one place. more so to be able to easily backup all their content regularly(in case something goes wrong with server etc). haven’t come across someone reporting that keeping their stuff on 2 domains got them in trouble. a guy can write for more than 1 blog as well & then they might want to post that article etc. on their own blog as well; lots of people do this & a number of blogs that pay you to contribute allow you to post the article you wrote on your own blog as well.
You have timed your move well.blogger seem to be getting into serious crap.I have lost my blogs and there is no way to contact the blogger team.They have a link to a contact form but it either does not take thro. to completion or it does not trigger an acknowledgement to your inbox.
Even the blog i mentioned here does not go thro.All returns a 404 page not found error.It is really disgusting.Not sure how you managed on blogger for this long.I had been there only for one year now.I have to move to wordpress but i need to start all over again.
I guess all of us go through the same phase. I had a popular blog on Blogspot some 3 years back, but then I scrapped it all to together and created a WordPress powered blog. I guess, that was my mistake.
BTW, Amit… can we see your business card. Just to see how it looks like…
maybe, we can gain some inspirations from you.
very well explained!!
I think that Wordpress is good if you host your own site. It has better themes, the post editor is more advanced than that of blogger (e.g. it allows one to insert special symbols), it allows to create regular web sites and not only pages, adding widgets is straightforward…
On the other hand, if the blog/site is hosted by Wordpress, then I think that blogger is more interesting for the following reasons:
-Blogger does not have a limitation on disk space. The limit with wordpress is 50MB.
-It is not possible to customize wordpress themes (at the CSS level).
-Blogger allows the integration of Adsense units in smooth way (but, still a bit of hacking is still needed). The integration of Ad units has to be done manually. On the other hand, people who host their Worpress sites benefit from tons of plugins that ease the integration of Adsense units.
I was about to make the same remark about duplicate content, but you already answered that. So, I guess that duplicate content is allowed as long as it is limited to 2 or 3 domains.
I have a web site whose pages look very similar to SE, but not to users because most of the content is generated using AJAX and I did not incur any penalties.
Hi Amit,
This is indeed one of your best posts.
But tell me what is the advantage of wordpress over that forced you to take such drastic steps. For me blogger is more than sufficient for all purposes. Anything that’s possible in wordpress can be done in blogger too, with a bit of tweaking and getting yourself dirty. So was the whole process worthwhile?
hi amit, Thanks. This article was very usefull for me. I was also planning to shift from blogger to wordpress from past few months.
I made this move from Blogspot with my Significant Figures site earlier this year and exploited the option to redirect to new hosting from Blogspot. It took just a few weeks for my imported site under Wordpress hosted under my own domain to gain the pagerank it had as a Blogspot site. It was only possible to do the permanent redirect once Blogspot went to the new version. Here’s how to switch to a custom domain from Blogspot to any CMS o your own domain host.
Dear Amit,
I too moved out of blogspot. But still using blogspot hosting.! is there any issues there? I went to wordpress.., but need to spend more money in there to add a custom domain.!
What would you recommend me?
Question to all WP users. Is there a migration tool to move content from Blogger when you have hosted WP?
Rajesh,
I’m doing a transit from Blogger to self-hosted Wordpress right now, using a subdomain for testing purposes, the new Import function in Wordpress 2.3 is close to perfect. There’s no better migration tool out there.
I would like to know how to redirect Non-WWW to Normal www via Google Apps/ Enom, I disabled the start page but still.
Hi Amit,
This post saved me heaps of time redirecting my subscribers. Thanks a heap!
Adrian
How many visitors a day on your website is good enough to make decent money on good adsense?
Hey Amit: On a frend’s advice, I shifted from blogspot to wordpress some three months ago, and the results have been fantastic:
1. The number of hits have crossed 4000
2. My technorati rank has gone up from 13 lakh to just 6 lakh
3. My blog’s value has gone up from zero to $8000.
4. I get an average of 60 visitors a day. On one day, i got 150 visitors, which is fantastic for a 3-month-old blog.
One request: If you could please visit my blog, and let me know your impressions, suggestions, that would be wonderful.
Thanks.
Hi,
I have moved from my blogspot.com blog to self hosted one with wordpress.
Is there a way that the moment people come to my blogspot.com, they are redirected to my new domain? Please email me. I need help
Like to change to wordpress having New Blogspot + Google Enom domain.
Please tell me:
- do I have to change anything with my domain?
- is there any step by step guide for me?
thx
Chris