There are a lot of uncertainties when changing platforms that will appear as you make the migration, in this post we solve some that are the trigger for the bad positioning of many blogs.
In this post we are going to face two certainties that scare us:
- Finding your blog when you migrate a mess out of place
- Redirect URLs to avoid losing positioning
When you decide to take the step to migrate your blog from Blogspot to WordPress.org it is a considered decision, I would like to say better a tactical decision because either the strategy of your blog needs it or you are going to expand the field of work with your blog.
Surely you have heard that changing your blog to WordPress will turn it into a more professional blog overnight, which is necessary if you want your blog to grow and many more topics that are far from being true.
One of the problems of the happy migration is that nobody tells you the intermediate steps, or some aspects related to SEO that can make your life impossible. With this post I don’t want to tell you not to switch to wordpress, which is a trap, but I do want to take into account some things that can happen to you when changing platforms and that have a solution, but the sooner you apply it, the better. The blog upside down! if i know i don’t change
I like to draw this analogy between migrations and removals because I think it fits this concept very well:
When you move from a small house such as in this case Blogger to a larger one with more rooms in which you can add a lot of extras (wordpress) the furniture you bring may stay dancing and not just look like you would like.
This is the most normal case in design that when importing the blog you find that it is very misplaced, the other way around from blogger to wordpress it is not so noticeable but vice versa.
It seems that the images in your posts are floating senselessly and that the text is piling up in a hideous way.
This is normal, when applying a template in wordpress when migrating from blogspot, only the content will be brought: post, titles, images, videos… and the metadata: date, author, tags… So the template styles you had in your blog are lost to adapt to the new wordpress.
This is easy to solve, you can retouch the images of the posts one by one and choose the featured image, see what is the size that best suits your new template and resize them, normally the templates allow you to choose several layouts for them by default. post so you can find one that suits your previous measurements. In wordpress both for SEO and for readers the information architecture is very important, you must include headings and paragraphs so that everything is not cluttered.
Avoid duplicating your content with the two blogs open.
I think this is the point for which I have written this post, avoid duplicating the content.
For this reason, when migrating you must make sure that you are blocking search engines in the general settings box> reading> Visibility in search engines, Check the box and for more security place a robots txt file blocking the access to the new wordpress site until you have removed the previous one from blogspot.
This is a point that goes unnoticed in the migration and can make a mistake in the SEO of your new blog since you would index duplicate content from the previous blog.
It is very important that you keep a copy of your Blogspot blog as it is at the time of migration for things that you will have to do later; such as requesting the removal of old urls from Google.
Once you have your blog in wordpress ready to show the world, you must redirect to the new blog.
From blogspot there is the possibility of doing it from blogspot by adding the redirect to the current blog so that the visits made from the previous URL go to the new one.
But I recommend you do it first in wordpress, to get the same url structure as in blogspotWhen you go to settings permanent links you must change the one that has WP by default for this one that is similar to the one you have in blogspot.
You will have a little problem if one of them has a long title since blogger leaves them in 39 characters so it is possible that those permalinks have to change them by hand in their corresponding entry.
To avoid having to do the redirects one by one there is a plugin called blogger 301 redirect that will do your dirty work, you should not delete the blogger’s blog since you may have errors since the net
The plugin will ask you for various url configurations and will generate a code that they have to put in the html template of your blogger blog to make the redirect, let’s say it generates a httacces for the brave.
Be careful not to delete blog content from blogspot because you don’t have to.
For the more complex redirects it is convenient to do them through the httacces file, it is the most delicate within a web, later I want to dedicate a series of posts to this file to do very useful things with it, but I think it is not the right time to this post because just landed on wordpress is getting into 11 rod shirts.
Once the content you have on blogger has been redirected, you can uncheck the box to deter search engines.
One tip is that you do not run to register your blog in the Search console because the previous one can still be indexed, it is even advisable to ask Google to de-index the URLs of all the posts of your previous blog if you have many cases of 404.
At this point, if you have read the other post about false myths in migration, you will say I know why it said that it was better to stay with the two open blogs
Losing positioning is a proven fact.
I think this is the point that most worries those who migrate a blog with many posts and years of experience.
The age of the domain is a key factor in SEO that is why there are websites with terrible names that are not changed so as not to lose the positioning and the DA that they have conquered for years.
If you have changed the URL or not, the normal case is that you migrate from the blogspot URL that you cannot take with you but if you redirect, if you have not had time to do it you can do it now, because wordpress is very good at these things and if you change the structure of permalinks it solves it by itself.
