Posted by on June 21st, 2010 View Comments
Posted in SEO - Search Engine Optimization |
Transferring your Blogger content to a newly established web host is not a difficult task to accomplish. Remember that you can always resort to the common method of copying all of your texts, images files and other elements from your older blog or web site and inserting them into your new site. For instance, you have a page in Blogspot in www.myblog.blogspot.com and you are planning to move your contents in a new web domain located at www.mynewblog.com. You can also bring your content in to the new publishing software through your new hosting environment WordPress. However, you may encounter problems from migrating or even duplicating your site to a new domain name.
Problems with Older Methods
Usually, after transferring your duplicated content from all of your web pages, you need to create a 301 redirect on your old web site so that your visitors and the search engine crawlers automatically stumble upon your new site when trying to access a web page from your older site. However, you may encounter problems when you have no access to the web host of your old domain, thus you won’t be able to implement the 301 redirect. Also, you won’t be able to set up 301 redirects when you need to transfer your web site from a web server that does not feature server-side redirects. If you are transferring your site from Blogger to a new one under WordPress, you cannot just utilize 301 redirects.
Also, copying your content incorrectly could cause your new domain to encounter problems with search engines like Google. If you export your Blogspot content and import them to your new site improperly, Google might penalize your site for what it will perceive as duplicate content. The search engine might not also transfer the corresponding PageRank values from the old site to the new one.
The Canonical Tag
Fortunately, life has become a little easier for webmasters who can now move their content from one domain to another without the use of 301 redirects and without encountering canonical issues that may arise from this. The Link Rel Canonical Tag helps you to inform search engines about the new domain of your old content without the need to change anything on the server side. This element allows site owners and bloggers to suggest the version of the page that Google should treat as canonical. Basically, a canonical page is the preferred version of a set of web pages with closely identical content. Google will take the canonical attribute into account when deciding which web page URL sets contain similar content and analyzing the most relevant of the pages to display in search engine results pages, or SERPs. This canonical link element is especially helpful for those who are moving their blog content from the Blogger web host to an entirely new domain.
In general, this works by editing the section of the HTML template source of your existing web pages on the previous domain and include a rel=canonical tag link that leads to the new one. It was basically created to allow website publishers to specify exact web page URLs of whichever domain is preferred for indexing.
Canonical Tag Application to Blogger-hosted Blogs
If you are hosting a blog on through Blogger and planning to transfer your blog to a new domain, you can conveniently move your blog by adding a Link Rel Canonical Tag element to your Blogger template source code.
Implement Blogger Scripting Codes
You will have to implement blogger scripting codes in your Blogger template source code. But first, you have to check whether your Blogspot blog is new XML-based or classic based, because Blogger scripting codes only work in XML-based Blogger template. While logged in into your Blogger account at www.blogger.com, look carefully for your blog in the dashboard and compare the Blogger URL column (old domain) and the equivalent WordPress URL column (new domain). If the blog URLs to be transferred to the new domain uses “Layout”, then your blog already has the New XML-based template. However, if you see “Template” under your blog, then your blog is still in the “classic” Blogger template. In this case, you will need to convert the classic template to a new XML-based template.
To convert your blog template, simply go to the “Template” section at the Dashboard once you log in. Then, click the “Customize Design” option at the header of the Template menu. When you select “Upgrade Your Template”, you will be requested to select a new template for you blog among the different options. It is advisable to select a template that is closest to your current one. After this, click “Save Template”. Your Blogspot blog’s template should now be XML-based. Take note that you do not need to do this when your existing template is already XML-based.
Tag Blog Archives with Meta No Index
Since you are only planning to move the content of blog post URLs, the rest of your pages must be tagged with the Meta No Index attribute. The Meta No Index tag is used to advise automated Google search engine crawlers to avoid indexing your archives in the old domain.
The tag must be correctly inserted in the tag of the HTML template source of Blogger. If done incorrectly, all URLs, including the blog post and home page URLs will also be tagged with the Meta No Index tag and will also be affected.
To place this in the Blogger template of your archives, you will need the following codes to be inserted next to the tag:
This tag is necessary because the archives are not needed to be migrated to your new web host, since the archived pages that will be moved in the new domain under the new web host have no corresponding URLs. Also, they are deemed unnecessary to be indexed by Google anymore because it would create duplication problems with the content now transferred to the new domain.
Insert Front Page Link Rel Canonical Tag
After placing the Meta No Index tag at the section of the template, it is now time to put the front page URL next to it. The front page link rel canonical tag will look something like this:
According to the code above, if the requested URL is equal to http://myoldblog.blogspot.com/ then return the link rel canonical tag in the section:
The URL above in the tag refers to your home page of the new domain, http://www.mynewdomain.com/. This corresponds to the Blogger front page URL.
Thus, when you combine the conditional meta no index tag with the front page link rel canonical tag, your section will now look like the following:
Place Link Rel Canonical Tags for all Blogger URLs
After creating a tag for your home page, the next step you will need to do is to generate Link Rel Canonical tags for every Blogger blog page remaining so that all of your pages point to their corresponding URLs in the new web host. The number of tags you have to place will depend on the amount of pages or URLs your blog has. For example, your Blogspot blog has a total of 31 URLs, excluding your front page. Thus, you will need to place 31 more link rel canonical tags at the section of the HTML template source of Blogger.
However, if your blog has more pages that would reach up to hundreds of blog posts, you might need the help of MS Excel to computerize the process and make it much easier. Through using MS Excel, you can use the Concatenate Function to automatically create the link rel canonical tag. Remember that you have previously obtained data about the Blogger URL column (old domain) and the equivalent WordPress URL column (new domain) from the Dashboard while checking if your blog template is either XML-based or classic based. You can plot your data of the Blogger URLs and the equivalent domain URLs in the MS Excel spreadsheet and use the Concatenate Function to make the process quicker (treat the new domain URL and the old Blogger URLs as “variables” and the other elements of the Blogger link rel canonical script as “constants”). The whole thing is a bit complicated but you can download an available template for the link rel canonical automation at http://www.php-developer.org/link-rel-canonical-automation-excel-template-for-blogger/.
Once all the data is processed, you can now select all of the generated link rel canonical tags and place all of them on a text editor like Notepad or MS Word. Then, you can copy and paste all of the tags to the HTML template source of Blogger below the front page link rel canonical tag:
At this point, all of the remaining link rel canonical tags for all the remaining blog pages that point to the new domain are placed. You can now select the “Save Template” option and review the template source codes. Try to open any page in your Blogspot blog, and you can now see a particular link rel canonical tag at the section that has the Blogger page URL pointing to its corresponding URL located in another domain under a new web host.
After-effects
Search engines would usually take around three to six months to move the page and link attributes to the new web host. Eventually, you will see that your new domain will replace your previous blog URLs in search rankings.
The next time you update your blog, you should now update in your new domain rather than in your old Blogger site. However, you should not still delete your Blogspot blogs.
