Loading...Blogger is probably the best free blogging platform and is failry customizable. Its easy to setup a blogger blog and start writing right away. Many bloggers start around that way. But after a certain time, they prefer switching to WordPress because of better customization options in WordPress. Blogger to WordPress migration is easy as there is a dedicated WordPress plugin for the migration purpose. Redirecting Blogger blog to WordPress can be done with meta refresh. But that sort of redirection isn’t much search engine friendly.
Blogger is a free service by Google so you cannot have a 301 redirection for your Blogger blog as you cannot have the access to the .htaccess file. 301 Redirection, popularly known as the permanent redirection is the best way to let Google and other search engines know that a content has been moved to another blog. 302 is the temporary redirection and isn’t much search engine friendly. While redirecting blogger to wordpress, we can use none other than meta refresh redirection. Google Webmasters support doesn’t recommend this type of URL redirection. Google Webmasters support says that it is a simple form of redirection but is not supported by browsers and isn’t much good for the users. Similarly W3C also doesn’t recommend as with this technique, a time should be specified before the users are redirected to another page which can disorient the users. So the meta refresh technique for Redirection, the only way for content redirection in Blogger isn’t much search engine friendly. It isn’t recommended to redirect Blogger blog to WordPress using meta-refresh redirection.
We generally use redirection to show that a blog has been moved to another URL and thus to avoid duplicate content. As meta-refresh redirect is not a good method of redirection, we can move the content to a WordPress blog and then remove the content from blogger so that the content remains unique on WordPress blog. After importing all content and setting up the WordPress blog, go to your blogger template section. Revert the template to classic template. Delete the lines of code already present there and insert these lines instead.
<html>
<head>
<meta content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"/>
<meta content="google-webmasters-verification-code" />
</head>
<body>
<div style=’position: absolute; top: 30px; left: 30px; border: solid 2px #333; color: #000; background-color: orange; padding: 5px; width: 400px; z-index: 5; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;’>
<p><strong>This blog has moved!</strong></p>
<p>The new URL for this blog is <br/> <a href=’http://yourdomain.com/’> <strong>http://yourdomain.com</strong></a> <br/> Please update your bookmarks.</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Replace yourdomain.com with the domain for your WordPress blog and “google-webmasters-verification code” with the verification code provided by Google webmasters for your blogspot blog. Now save the template.
We have added NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW to the code that will tell Google not to index the pages from the blogspot blog any more. But that will take time. So besides that, use the URL removal tool from Google Webmasters. Before that, go to the Settings page of the blogspot blog and under “Basic Settings” select “No” for letting search engines find your blog. This will prevent any search engine from crawling your site further as it adds the respective code in the robots.txt file. The NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW tags added to the blog and the blockage via robots.txt will prevent other search engines like Bing and Yahoo from crawling the blogspot blog as well and the indexed pages will gradually be removed from them as well.
Now on Google Webmasters, select your Blogspot blog and click on Crawler access under Site Configuration. Now click on “Remove URL”. Click “New Removal Request” and leave the text field blank. Next click on continue and then confirm that the blogspot blog is blocked by Robots.txt. Now wait for a few days and the content from your blogspot blog will be deleted from Google Search. This will make the content on your WordPress blog unique. If you have links pointing to the blogspot blog, update them so that they point to the self hosted WordPress blog.
As Meta Refresh isn’t a search engine friendly redirection, it is better not to redirect from Blogger to WordPress and instead use the NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW tags, robots.txt and URL removal tool on blogspot and update thmetae backlinks to gain better Search Engine Results.