How to move a blog, part 4 (series)

In Part 1 I talked about backing up the current blog, in Part 2 I talked about configuring the new one, and in Part I discussed redirecting the old blog to the new blog. But redirection only works if you control the system that the original blog was running on. What if you don't?

The Blogger curse

I see it happen all the time. Someone creates a blog on Blogger and hosts it for free on Blogger's blogspot.com domain. Then the blog gets popular and the blogger wants more control over things and suddenly moving off of Blogger becomes both a priority and a problem. The problem isn't the postings, it's redirecting the traffic from the blogspot.com address to the blog's new address.

This is why, of course, I always advocate getting your own domain name and a hosting service to actually host the blog. This doesn't mean you can't use Blogger — the blog on the home page of CluelessAbout is a Blogger-managed blog, for example. But the very fact that the blog pages are on a host you control means you can do things like the redirection trick I discussed in Part 3, things you can't do if blogspot.com (or a subdomain from another blogging service) hosts your blog for you.

So what can you do? Let's look at the different approaches.

Rebuild your audience

The simplest option is to just bite the bullet and remove your old blog (after moving all the postings to the new blog, of course) from the blogging service. Actually, “remove” is too strong a word. Delete all the existing postings, yes, but then post a new entry saying that the blog's moved. Anyone who finds or reads your old blog will hopefully update their bookmarks accordingly.

Painful, but simple.

Link to each new post

This one takes more work. If you can't redirect the old blog to the new blog, edit each entry in the old blog and insert a paragraph at the beginning that says something like “This blog entry has moved to title of posting“, where title of posting is a link to the new posting. Make sure the anchor text of the link is the full title of the posting, don't just say “This blog entry has moved here“. Always keep good SEO techniques in mind whenever you're linking, even if you're just moving things around!

If you're up to it, trim the old posting to just the bare minimum. Give people a reason to jump over to the new blog.

While you're at it, turn off comments and trackbacks for the old postings.

This is a lot more work than the first option, but there's a better chance of directing readers to the new blog.

Redirect via JavaScript

If your blogging platform allows it, you can insert a small snippet of JavaScript in each posting to redirect the user to the right spot. This is similar to what I discussed last time, but it's not as good a solution because it depends on JavaScript and search engines won't be able to follow the redirection like they can when it's done at the HTTP level via a 301 redirect. So you definitely want to combine this approach with the second approach of including a link to the new posting at the beginning of the old posting.

This is even more work, but it gets you close to what you can do with an HTTP redirect.

Next, we'll be looking at what you can do to get your new blog listed in Technorati, Bloglines, and similar services.

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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