Moving from Blogger to WordPress

In this case, I not only changed from blogger.com to a self-hosted wordpress blog, I also changed the custom URL.

My hosting choice was Bluehost.com. (Google “Bluehost discount” for the best affiliate link rates.) Setup with wordpress was very easy, as bluehost has a great integration tool on their dashboard. In addition, there’s a simple WordPress tool for you to just suck in all of your blogger.com posts automatically into WordPress. In WordPress, go to Tools > Import. Select Blogger from the list. It took about 3 minutes to dupe my entire blog into wordpress.

1) For a general overview, here’s a plain english guide to the steps for the blog hosting move. There are many technical holes in this, so just use it as an overview checklist of things to solve.

2) Forwarding from blogger to wordpress. This site walks you step by step with pictures through a) forwarding posts from old to new, b) not getting penalized by googlebots for duplicate content, and c) leave a custom message as you forward people from your old to new blog

3) Here is a site that will help you ensure that your URLs match so that the old blog post points correctly to the new blog post.

4) Google Wemaster Tools recently opened up the ability to TELL its bots that you’re moving URLs. This is fantastic since you can’t do a 301 redirect in blogger.com since you don’t have access to the root directory. Activate a Google Webmaster account for your blog in order to get to the tool to alert Google.

The biggest test is that after a few months, my pagerank has held relatively steady. Therefore, my thought is that Google is okay with what I did. Does anything else really matter?