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Moving blog to new domain : Advice and welcome feedback

Many lawyers and other professionals start a blog on blogger or typepad and then wish to have a blog with more features, a better design and its own domain name. Most often they are looking looking to upgrade to Moveable Type or WordPress. At the same time, they do not want to start over in getting good search engine results as is apt to happen with Google's penalizing new domains and losing links to your current blog.

Darren Rowse at problogger has a nice post and follow up comments on the subject. Darren cited a post from Matt Cutts at Google where Matt discussed changing domains using his own domain as an example of the domain being changed:

All other things being equal, I would recommend to stay with the original domain if possible. But if you need to move, the recommended way to do it is to put a 301 (permanent) redirect on every page on mattcutts.com to point to the corresponding page on someotherdomain.com. If you can map mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com/url1.html, that’s better than doing a redirect just to the root page (that is, from mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com). In the olden days, Googlebot would immediately follow a 301 redirect as soon as it found it. These days, I believe Googlebot sees the 301 and puts the destination url back in the queue, so it gets crawled a little later. I have heard some reports of people having issues with doing a 301 from olddomain.com to newdomain.com. I’m happy to hear those reports in the comments and I can pass them on to the crawl/indexing team, but we may be due to replace the code that handles that in the next couple months or so. If it’s really easy for you to wait a couple months or so, you may want to do that; it’s always easier to ask crawl/index folks to examine newer code than code that will be turned off in a while.

A good deal of discussion on the subject follows via comments to Matt's post.

Not something the average professional non tech person is equipped to handle but something that can be considered and acted upon by development companies. I'll be discussing Matt's advice with LexBlog's IT Manger and Web Producer – better yet, I'll ask them to add a comment here.

  • http://www.privacylawyer.ca/blog David T.S. Fraser

    Thanks for the posting, Kevin.
    I run my blog, The Canadian Privacy Law Blog (http://www.privacylawyer.ca/blog), using Bloggger. I recently decided to move my blog from a BlogSpot domain to my own. It took a lot of digging around to find a way to do it without killing my Google rankings and losing people who already had the BlogSpot blog bookmarked. I was hobbled by the fact that Blogger does not give you any control over the DNS entry for your BlogSpot subdomain or even the ability to use .htaccess for redirects. Many of my postings contain links to earlier postings and there is no global search and replace in Blogger to fix those (eg replace http://pipeda.blogspot.com with http://www.privacylawyer.ca/blog).
    The solution I came up with was to leave the existing blog at the old blogspot location and republish the entire blog at the new domain, but to use javascript to redirect any hits on the old domain to the same page on the new domain. I've described how I did it on my blog at http://www.privacylawyer.ca/blog/2005/07/canadian-privacy-law-blog-has-moved.html.
    It isn't elegant, but it worked. Any hit on pipeda.blogspot.com/somepage.html is instantly redirected to http://www.privacylawyer.ca/blog/somepage.html.
    Sorry for the long-winded comment, but it took ages for me to figure out how to do it seamlessly and I thought that this might save a lot of time for your readers who are considering a move using Blogger.