I had an old blog (from 2003) that had lots of good rep and some google rank just on the fact that it was OLD. I waited for years to move it from Blogger to WordPress on the basis that I really didn’t want to lose the ranking that it still held onto.
Well, due to the fact that I am a total amateur, I went through some very damaging steps because I simply didn’t know what to do. First I used a v-e-r-y slow meta-refresh to transfer people from the old Ilona’s Garden Journal to the new Home Garden Companion site.
Not a good idea. Besides being slow, it is seen as a malicious script.
I tried turning all 1000+ posts into drafts and taking the blog private. I felt like that was shooting myself in the foot!
So, finally I got serious, looked up how to make a proper 301 redirect and bit the bullet.
For those of you who don’t want to do all the really messy, bad stuff that I did…here is the really useful, clear page of instructions complete with the code you will need to make these happen.
How To Switch Using 301 Redirects~From WP Beginner, great info for anyone trying to work on a wp blog.
The redirects appear to work well. I don’t know if I will recover the Google ranking after all my shenanigans, but it was Bing Webmaster tools and Google info that helped me realize the importance of creating proper redirects when moving a site.
Be sure to use Bing and Google webmaster tools (both of them). They are free, don’t take much of your time, and prove extremely useful when you need to know insights about your blogs.
Hope this helps someone else trying to move their large site from Blogger to WordPress.
This is the step, AFTER migrating the posts over to the new blog.
I found that step to be pretty easy because I used the included import plugin in the WordPress installation. It worked extremely well and IÂ only had to upload some missing pictures. Which was relatively easy.
