Moving The System from Blogger to WordPress

Hello World – The System is back and we’ve got some pretty good stuff for you this Summer that we’ve been researching while the blog has been getting a makeover, and a forced change by Google from a Blogger ftp site to the new WordPress platform.

Things we are going to be looking at in detail soon are black hat techniques for getting your competitors website in trouble with Google and some blueprints for using social media marketing to dominate the rankings!

Anyway regular readers will recall that a few months ago I wrote a post describing the advantages of Blogger ftp hosting on your own domain, keeping all the lovely link juice for yourself and sitting at the heart of the Google network. The Rasputin Effect

So Do the Google Crew read my posts? – You Bet!

Within a few months they announce that they are killing all ftp sites because it puts a strain on their server resources! What a load of Bull!

Here’s some of the possible reasons they did it.

Insulation and Protectionism.  To tie in their soft clients (non techies) even deeper into the Google mesh of gmail, gwave, youtube etc etc and to keep them in the google server circle.

To steer all that lovely link juice that you bloggers have created back to the Google circle and to keep you away from all those other social media sites such as Facebook that threaten Google’s Alexa position.

But probably because they read my post and decided to stop marketers from taking advantage. The SERPS are full of blog listings for every keyword.  Google was losing control!

It will be interesting to see how many old ftp Blogger blogs that now redise at www.googlesgotmyjuice.blogspot.com retain their rankings in the weeks to come!

And what a waste of good generic domain names!

GET THIRSTY GOOGLE YOU AINT HAVIN MY JUICE!

Anyway for those of you who are still stuck or have moved your blog to Blogspot already, here’s the solution step by step.  If you’ve already moved your blog onto Blogspot, no worries, you’ve got to do that anyway, so you can now follow these steps and move your blogspot blog back onto your own domain and keep all you lovely link juice!

1. Download WordPress to your PC and follow the quick installation instructions

2. Go to the host of your old ftp blog and download the files to your PC for back up

3. Upload the wordpress files to your blogs server

4. Set up your MySQL database and change the details in the config.php file

5. Activate and set up your wordpress blog and choose a theme

OK thats the normal part…

6. Go to Settings/permalinks and change the format to  year/month/post file structure (similar to Blogger’s).

7. Now go back to ftp and delete all the Blogger files from the server including the index.html.  Your WordPress blog should now appear with the index.php file live. If you fail to delete the post files eg 2009/12/ then this will cause conflict later with the WordPress file structures.

8. Open a new browser window and connect to your blog at blogspot. Now is a good time to grab the template of  your old Blogger blog so you can replicate things like all the sidebar changes you made easily in the new WordPress blog.

9. Go back to WordPress and go to Tools/import…..Blogger, and hit it! You will be asked to authorise the connection and the process is then automatic.

10. Press the magic import button and your posts and comments and labels will be imported into WordPress.  note the import feature is restricted to 200 posts so if you have more -  import 200, check what they are – thend go back to Blogspot and permanently delete the ones you’ve already imported. Then press clear and reimport…..

11. You now need to fix the file names so that you old blogger filenames are the same as the new ones, less the extension .html

This is done by importing a plugin into WordPress  called wp-maintain-blogger-permalinks.php

available from add plugins. Activate the plugin and run it from you tools section. This now now renamed all the imported files from the wordpress format to the original blogger filename minus the html and replaced with a /

12. You now need to make sure that all your old .html posts redirect to your new / posts. This is a laborious task if you have hundreds of posts  and is achieved through 301 permanent redirects. however it must be done if you want to channel all your existing link juice to the new blog pages and preserve your rank.

This is done by downloading the blogs default .htaccess file  and adding the following lines to the file before the *begin WordPress section

redirect 301 /2009/06/thenameofyourpost.html http://www.thenameofyourwebsite.com/2009/06/thenameofyourpost/

Unfortunately you’ve got to do this for every post! Happy cutting and pasting!

13. Unlucky for Google – go back to Blogspot and permanently delete the blog – After all even though they don’t exist for offsite content  – you would not want to risk any duplicate content penalties, especially as Google has rewritten the blogspot files and given then canonical authority- best to zap them!

All done.. Now comes the hard part of making the site look good and the nightmare of fixing all the rss feeds!

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