How to move a blog, part 5 (series)

Time to finish this series. In Part 1 I talked about backing up the current blog, in Part 2 I talked about configuring the new one, in Part 3 I discussed redirecting the old blog to the new blog, and in Part 4 I described strategies for redirection hosted blogs. Now let's talk about fixing up incoming links to your blog.

Losing your links

The worst thing about moving a blog is that you can easily lose all your incoming links if you're not careful about it. That's why the HTTP redirection described in Part 3 is important: if you can permanently redirect each posting at the old address to its new address then that will go a long way to fixing your incoming link problems, because both the browsers and the search engines will adjust their internal bookmarks accordingly. It'll probably take a while for the new links to replace the old ones in the search engines, but it should happen over time.

If you can't do a 301 redirect then your task is harder, you have to be more proactive about finding and getting those inbound links changed. Even if you are redirecting, it's probably a good idea to do some of this. The first place you should start are the blog aggregation and search services.

Bloglines

After I moved this blog from MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com to memwg.com, I wanted to update the Bloglines subscriptions to the new address. All I did was shoot an email off to the Bloglines support people, telling them what the old feed address was and what the new one was, and within a couple of days they had fixed up the subscriptions. Very simple.

Technorati

Technorati, on the other hand, is always problematic for me. I'm doing a 301 redirect, so all I had to do with Technorati was re-claim the blog at the new address and embed the JavaScript code they give you on the main blog page in place of the old code. Then Technorati told me their crawlers would pick up the change and figure things out. Well, it hasn't happened yet. I still have both versions listed in my Technorati account. No response to my email about merging the two, either. All in all, pretty much par for the course in Technorati. I hope that eventually it will sort itself out.

Other services and sites

Make sure you update your ping notification services (like Ping-o-matic or Pingoat) appropriately — if you have them bookmarked, update your bookmarks.

For other links, take the manual approach. Send mail to the owner of the blog/site and tell them you've changed your address and if they'd be willing to change some or their links. Few people are going to go through all their old postings and update their links, but ideally they'll change your site listing in their blogroll.

I hope this mini-series has been a help to some of you. Let me know if you need more details on what I've described.

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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