How to move a blog, part 3 (series)

Well, the AdSense ads are back on this blog, which is now originating from the memwg.com domain instead of the MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com domain. I moved the blog over last night and so far things seem to be working well enough, so I re-enabled the display of AdSense ads since Google's not blocking this domain. Which brings us back to my mini-series on moving a blog. As you recall, in Part 1 I talked about backing up the current blog and in Part 2 I talked about configuring the new one. What you do next is import the old postings into the new blog and then redirect the old blog to the new one. But that's easier said than done in some configurations…

Importing old postings

Once you've configured the new blog to your liking, you should import the old postings. Better to do this before announcing the “new” blog to the world. How you do it depends on the software you're using, but it should be a fairly simple process because others would have done it before and a bit of searching the Internet will find you detailed instructions for your particular blogging software.

When importing, though, be sure to disable the pinging of services like Pingoat and Ping-O-Matic. Again, you don't want anyone visiting your blog before it's ready.

Redirecting the old blog

This is perhaps the most important step. It can be really easy or really hard depending on the blogging platform you were using.

Ideally, anyone who accesses one of your existing blog postings at the old address — you know, those postings with all the inbound links — should get automatically redirected to the equivalent posting at the new address. For example, if you followed this link now:

http://www.MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com/blog/adsense/How-to-move-a-blog-part-1-series.html

you'd actually be sent seamlessly to this page:

http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/How-to-move-a-blog-part-1-series.html

Not just you, but the search engines, too — anyone following the old links gets sent to the new blog. This is done through the magic of HTTP redirection.

HTTP Redirection

HTTP is the protocol (the communication standard) that a browser uses to get pages from a web server. When a web server responds to a browser's request, one of the things it does is send back a status code, which is basically a number describing the status of the request. Normally, the status code “200″ is sent back along with the contents of the page that was requested and the browser simply displays the page. But other status codes are possible. The one you're probably most familiar with is the “404″ code, the “Page Not Found” response that occurs when ask for a page that doesn't exist.

As it happens, the people who defined HTTP realized early on that web pages might move from one location to another. So there are redirection status codes that let the browser know a page has moved. For all practical purposes, there are only two status codes that matter: “301″ for permanent redirections and “302″ for temporary redirections. (Permanent means “this page has definitely moved to this new location, update your internal bookmarks accordingly and never call me again” while temporary means “this page has temporarily moved, so go to the new location but don't update your internal bookmarks and check with me first next time you want the page”.) The new location of the page is sent along with the status code so that the browser knows where to fetch it from.

The ideal situation, then, is to configure your old blog to send a 301 status code for every request, redirecting the browser to the equivalent page on the new blog. This isn't too hard to do if you actually have access to the web server that runs the old blog. If you're using the Apache web server, for example, you can add entries to the .htaccess file in the root of your blog directory to redirect incoming requests to the new site.

To see how this works in reality, visit Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer page. On this page you can enter any URL and see exactly what the browser would see. Enter in the address of my old blog:

http://www.MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com/blog/adsense/

Then press the “Submit” button. You'll see a lot of output, but it's not too hard to follow. First comes the request to the web server:

GET /blog/adsense/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.makeeasymoneywithgoogle.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Connection: close

Notice how the URL of the web page we want got split into two parts, the host part (”www.makeeasymoneywithgoogle.com”) and the path part (”/blog/adsense”). Next comes the response back from the web server:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 15:30:05 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Location: http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type:·text/plain(CR)(LF)

As you can see, the response was a 301 redirection, with the new location being specified as “http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/”. The HTTP viewer then follows the redirection request just as a real browser would, and eventually you'll see the raw content of the blog page returned to you. It's a handy little tool for figuring out these kinds of things.

But what if you don't have access to the web server to force it to redirect requests for your blog postings? This is not an uncommon case — if you're hosting your blog on blogspot.com, for example, this is exactly your situation. Well, we'll leave that for tomorrow's posting.

P.S.: I also have an HTTP viewer tool available, but it's the opposite of Rex Swain's tool. My tool shows you what the web server sees when it gets a request from a browser, not what the web server returns. Interesting in its own right, though.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.

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