Q&A: Blogspot Blog Domain to WordPress Custom Domain
November 20, 2009
I was just asked by a colleague about an acquaintence of his who wants to move her blog from a something.blogspot.com URL (Blogger/Blogspot subdomain) to her own domain, and in the process move over to WordPress… without losing traffic. Currently she gets a good deal of traffic, all to her pages which are indexed under the Blogspot subdomain URL.
If you have experience with this please weigh in!!!
My reply:
I don’t really know for sure here as I’ve never done this, but I would probably go about it like this:
1) First, switch from the blogspot subdomain to the “custom domain” feature. Its in the settings > publishing tab. There may be a small fee for this, my guess is its like $10 or something very small.
2) Confirm that this is working, and that its sending 301 redirects for the old blogspot pages to the same URLs (minus the change in domains) on the new domain.
3) Wait for Google to reindex everything… probably a few weeks.
4) Export everything and import into a new WordPress install (on a testing domain or temp URL). When doing this, ensure the test domain is blocking search engines. There is probably a handy plugin or too to import from Blogger to WordPress.
5) Configure the URLs in WordPress to match the same formatting as the old Blogger blog, and make sure it works right.
6) Launch the new WordPress blog by repointing the domain from Blogger to the new server hosting the WordPress blog.
7) Go back into Blogger and add a little post saying the blog moved… everyone for each individual post should be redirected anyways but I’d still do this anyhow. Link to the new full domain URL. Make sure to keep paying Blogger to keep that custom domain feature intact b/c that is what is keeping the 301 redirects from the old pages with the Blogspot URLs to the new URLs on the new WordPress blog hosted on a new domain and server.
When complete, I don’t think you’ll keep 100% of the “juice” or traffic here, but I think you’ll keep 90% of it, plus you’ll gain by having your own domain name and more features and capabilities with WordPress. If you don’t mind a little effort to make the switch, I think its worthwhile.
Domain and Subdomain Mapping with TextPattern and GoDaddy
April 26, 2008
I just finished helping someone with an issue where they were trying to map blog.companyname.com to show their blog at companyname.textpattern.com. This is very similar to what I did with custom domain mapping with WordPress.com and GoDaddy, except its with TextPattern (not WP) and was a subdomain not a domain itself.
Here was the process that worked for us in this case:
0) Go through the wizard for “Domain Mapping” in TextPattern. Control Panel > Site Access > Domain Mapping. If doing a subdomain from your site to your TextPattern site, than put your entire blog.yoursite.com as the “domain” to map to yourblog.textpattern.com.
1) Delete anything you have in GoDaddy that relates to domain masking, subdomain masking, etc. Step 2 will take care of all of that. Make sure there is nothing else that will interfere. It could also be called “domain forwarding” or something. Edit: It is called Domain Forwarding
2) Delete any A records for “blog”. Do this even if you already called GoDaddy or TextPattern support and they told you to do this. They are wrong. This is needed in GoDaddy for domain Forwarding but you don’t want to do that. For mapping a CNAME subdomain you need to delete the masking (step 1) otherwise the forwarding takes precedence and your CNAME will never kick in.
3) Create a new CNAME entry. It has two parts. Where is says “host” put “blog”. No http. No www. Just “blog”. In the second part where it says “points to” put companyname.typepad.com. Again, no http. No www.
4) It may take up to 24 hours to kick in, but it usually does with 3-4 hours. Should be working by tomorrow morning. You may need to reboot your PC though for it to kick in as sometimes browsers cache the old method even if you try to dump your cache.
In this case, it was actually up and running within about 30 minutes. Good stuff. Many thanks to this article which was hard to find on the TextPattern site, but was helpful.
Also, if you do this and do the wizard part in Step 0, put “blog.companyname.com” as the “domain” early on in the wizard. Otherwise it will try to map your root domain and that won’t work if you are trying to map blog.companyname.com to your TextPattern blog.
Lastly, don’t let anyone at GoDaddy or TextPattern tell you that you can’t have it mapped the way you want it. You can. Its just not something that they are really familiar with. You can have your TextPattern blog (or your WP blog too I believe – not sure about the subdomain though on WP but 99% sure) “live” at blog.yourwebsite.com and keep that URL such that no one ever sees the something.textpattern.com version. Better for SEO. Better for Branding. Better.
So I Moved LeadGenSEO from Blogger to WordPress.com – 301 Redirects and Custom Domain Considerations
April 19, 2008
I’m a liar.
Exactly two days after saying I wouldn’t switch my 1.5 week old blog from Blogger to WordPress.com (hosted version) I did just that – transferred it over. Let me quote myself:
Taking everything into account, I’m going to lean slightly for the WordPress.com option. However, not strongly enough that I would consider converting over this blog which I just set up a few days ago through Blogger.
Liar. I switched. Why?
- Comments – I wanted comments to “live” on my domain. With blogger, they were in a pop-up box that was on a URL tied to the blogger.com domain. This means when people add comments I would get no search engine boost for new content, additional text, etc.
- Trackbacks – Blogger doesn’t have them. I felt like the kid who wasn’t invited to the cool party.
- Static Pages – No “pages” in Blogger. They are in WP. I like them.
- Categories – I’m a second-go-round blogger. I blogged alot a couple of years ago and was used to “categories”. Since I’ve been MIA someone came up with “tags”. They are foreign to me. Even worse is “labels” in Blogger. What exactly are they? Tags or categories?
- Friendlier URLs – I’m way anal about URL’s. Way anal. I couldn’t deal with the “.html” at the end of every URL in Blogger. That’s unnecessary. Its not a .html static page, so why pretend that it is? Just make it a nice clean directory clone with a “/” at the end. This drives me nuts.
So how difficult was it? Well, it wasn’t. WordPress has a nice Blogger import feature despite the fact that Blogger says “Blogger doesn’t not have an export feature.“ The catch – technically its not exporting anything, but WordPress gets authorization from Google and logs in to your Blogger account and pulls out the data.
But this next feature was way cool…
I mentioned the URL formats are different – Blogger using the .html at the end. Get this – WordPress actually sets up 301 redirects. If you are an SEO nerd like me, well having your blog set up 301 redirects for you is about as cool as it gets. I wish I knew this would happen though – as it would have saved me like an hour of time messing with DNS as I was trying to split off the www into a separate CNAME record so I could create a little .htaccess file and manually set up the 301′s myself. Geeky. Silly WordPress did it for me – though its not perfect as a few of the URL’s don’t seem to match up perfectly. Thanks to the 301 header check tool I can troubleshoot this though. Check it out:
Comment Spam Sucks – But at Least Do it Right!
April 18, 2008
Precursor
So I had this post written and queued up to post today, but I decided to switch my blog from Blogger (hosted, custom domain) to WordPress.com (hosted, custom domain) and while the import went great, the way that Blogger handles HTML in the body of comments did not come through nicely and as such I’m not going to call out the UK-based SEO agency who I was going to rag on (in a fun way) for comment spamming my new blog and several other SEO blogs. They are off the hook, this time!
Comment Spam – Sucks, But Come On – At Least Do It Right!!!
Now, what is spam and what is not spam is a matter of opinion – to some degree. If you have a blog you likely get a ton of spam – and most is easily identifiable. Its often not even actual sentences but just a ton of links. Some spammers though are a bit more intelligent, and they’ll offer comments like “Great post, thanks!”. These are done in automation, and are specifically generic so that its not obvious that they didn’t actually read your post.
Fine. This is nothing new. Transition…
The only thing worse than spam is poorly-done spam!
That’s what <company> has done. They put a link in the body of their comment (decent idea), but their code was funky – it inserted a BR tag at the end of the URL, making the URL invalid and thus the link wouldn’t count for them for SEO benefit.
Okay this was not fair. I don’t know that <company> or someone who works at <company> did this. Someone did. They posted links to the <company> website. It could be someone who does not work for them.
So once instance does not a spammer make. In fact, two doesn’t necessarily either. I’m using this term more playfully here – this group could be a nice group of people and if so I’ll buy them a beer or something.
This isn’t a unique incident though. I see it all the time. Its like they would rather do 100 crappy comments quickly (and only format their URL correctly 10 times) than do 20 legit comments and get 20 links (yes, I know they are all nofollowed anyhow).
Here’s an incident of a company doing exactly this, on this post by Jim Hedger. Full disclosure – I also posted a comment on that post.
The moral of the story is at least three-fold:
- The is a semi-spam that isn’t really traditional spam. This is a good example. They actually posted legit, thoughtful responses. To that extent, its not really spam. On the other hand, they do seem to be using links to their interior pages on their comments.
- If you do this (shoot I’m guilty on occasion myself!), make sure your URL is valid. Defeats the point if not, and silly guys like me will take it and run with it.
- Question: At what point is it spam? These guys “sort of” added a legit comment so perhaps I should let them off the hook as just frequent commenters who happened to choose to post links to their own site in every instance? Certainly this is way different than the typical poker comment spammer.
So today I just helped two of my colleagues set up their own blogs. We wanted to use hosted software such as Blogger or WordPress.com (not to be confused with WordPress aka WordPress.org).
These hosted options are less-customizable, but are much faster and easier to both setup and maintain. This means more time for creating content, promoting the blog, building a brand and generating leads! I can see how more time on content and link-building (read: relationship-building), and less time on the technical software management can be a good thing.
Lastly, we wanted to use our own custom domain names rather than having something.blogspot.com or something.wordpress.com. Better for branding, and also gives us an “asset” by relating the brand, links, content, etc. with US – the authors – rather than with Blogger or WordPress. This way we could switch platforms and not lose our entire audience and the asset we had built on someone else’s domain.
So here are the pros and cons for using Blogger (Blogspot) vs. WordPress (WordPress.com) for a hosted blogging application:
Blogger
Pro:
- Very easy to use interface
- Easy to configure layout arrangement
- Can use www or non-www for custom domain
- Totally free – just cost of your domain registration
Con:
- Can’t customize a style template (???)
- Lacks common blog features (or at least terminology) like “trackbacks” and “categories”, instead uses “labels”.
- Took me a little while to get the www version working correctly (CNAME record)
- (Edit: Added Later) Comments are held on the blogger domain, not your custom domain… meaning to search engines the copy/text in the comments is not something you will benefit from SEO-wise
WordPress.com
Pro:
- More features than Blogger, yet still less “unnecessary stuff” than full WordPress (.org)
- Very easy to tie the domain to the blog account
- More conventional “blog” type admin, especially if you are used to WordPress
- More configurability re: settings, spam filters, etc.
Con:
- Costs more – $10 per year plus cost of domain registration
- Maybe a bit more intimidating for a newbie to the blogging world
- Not as easy to make small layout changes (???)
- Can NOT use the www-version of the domain (see here – “note”)
Conclusion
I won’t take a hard stance – both are very good. WordPress.com is probably better for those who are willing to spend a little more time and want a few more features. Seems more customizable… if you can live without the “www” for your custom domain and the $10 fee for doing what you can do for free on Blogger (nominal, but its a principle thing). That said, for a newbie Blogger might be the better pick b/c it takes less time and work to just get started posting new entries.
Taking everything into account, I’m going to lean slightly for the WordPress.com option. However, not strongly enough that I would consider converting over this blog which I just set up a few days ago through Blogger.
For new blogs I create or help clients/associates to create, I will probably choose WordPress.com most of the time, and occasionally Blogger when I want something more “easy” and “lightweight”.
PS – Check out Lead Gen 101 and What’s New in MD?
Claiming a Blog in Technorati… RSS and It’s Beauty
April 9, 2008
So the real juice behind what makes a blog something other than just an easy way to post things on a website is the RSS technology that drives digital connectivity.
Blogs can automatically notify other blogs and feed readers (used by savvy blog-reading consumers… most of who are also blog owners and publishers) of updates. They can distribute content to other sites, notify other blogs when you are talking about them, etc. Even better, its totally automated and a piece of cake. You can even “subscribe” to someone else’s entire blog to receive instant update notifications whenever they post something new (without having to check their site), or just subscribe to a particular category if they discuss several topics, only one of which you care about.
And oh yeah, RSS doesn’t just enable blogs to communicate with users and with each other… it also pushes their content to search engines in a matter of hours, whereas typical web updates to non-RSS static webpages require you to wait for Google or other search engine spiders to visit your site and notice that you’ve updated. That typically takes a few days, and can take longer. Tough if you are in a “time is of the essence” type of industry, or commenting on recent news. By the time your blog is found, the story is dead. With RSS, you can enjoy rankings in Google within a few hours of posting, which are primarily fed via Google News.
Think push versus pull.
So what about that Technorati bit in the title?
You’ll notice I tend to go on a tangent before ever addressing the true topic of the post. Oh well. That’s me.
Since I just set this up yesterday, today I did a quick search on the title of yesterday’s post. No results. Thus, I’ve decided I should be a bit proactive in ensuring that other blog search engines receive my blog’s “push” of updates. Technorati is one such blog search engine. Its basically THE site about blogs, and up-to-the-minute blog updates. Google Blog Search is also similar, as are about 5,000 other services.
Anyhow, Technorati let’s you claim your blog, which enables you to see additional information, control some of the branding and description, etc. Good stuff. To do this though, you need to verify that you are the blog owner. One way to do this is to create a new post with a special code in that. When Technorati sees it on your blog they know you are the real owner. So being as that was my impetus in writing this post, here goes:
Pushing content or notifying other blogs and services of updates you’ve made (automatically of course) is known as pinging. Another site to consider is the popular Ping-O-Matic. Gotta love the name. 30 seconds of your life though, well worth it for additional traffic and exposure. Sometimes these services want the URL of your RSS feed in additional to your blog’s URL. Another 30 seconds searching the help section of your blog’s documentation will give you that, it varies from one provider to another.
Okay enough about that. Generally speaking this blog will be more opinion and fact-less conjecture rather than narrative “what is”, but hey we’re just getting started…
My Thoughts on Blogger, After Just 10 minutes
April 8, 2008
I have to say I’m quite impressed. I’ve built and managed several blogs over the past couple of years using WordPress, which I’m a huge fan of – but Blogger is extremely easy to use. I started setting up this blog 20 minutes ago (not 10, I lied) and I’ve got a nice little template, have already added Google Analytics and even my own domain via my GoDaddy account. Still killing time though before the domain resolves (should be within an hour).
I really like the “page elements” feature too. Made it real easy to add my Analytics script and also to modify the page. In general I feel the interface is easier to use than WordPress, and I’m now likely to recommend a Blogger account for many of my clients who want “quick and easy” blog. For those desiring more customization and more power-use features, I’ll likely stick to WordPress – but for light, quick, easy, etc. Blogger seems to be very nice.
My only complaint would be that it requires a Google Account. As I have several services and accounts with Google for different business ventures I’m associated with, this requires a little management on my end – which account for which features, etc. Its complicated. And boring. No use wasting Blogger’s db storage space on further elaboration!
Another observation – no “categories”??? I see Blogger makes use of “labels” though. I’m either missing something or just need to become a little more Web 2.0 and get with the whole label-program.
Okay so why this new blog. Well, three reasons:
- My business partner Ryan just set up a Blogger blog and I’m jealous
- I have had a Blogger account for participating in other blogs for a little while, but wanted to make better use of it.
- I run a Search Marketing firm, but all of our clients are service firms. Their websites generate leads. This is a very strong interest of mine – online lead generation. If you check my profile, you’ll see I also co-own an online lead generation firm.
To elaborate on #3 above… I’m starting to explore this as my true area of interest rather than SEO which is one source to support lead gen efforts. Companies want leads, not search rankings. Search rankings are merely one way to get leads. If you get search rankings and no leads, you’ve failed.
