Migrate from Blogger (Blogspot) to WordPress without Losing SEO, Links
There are more than a few of you who are hanging out on Blogger.com (also known as Blogspot) which is fine!
There is really nothing wrong with the platform in and of itself but if you’re interested in taking your blog to the next level, especially as it relates to monetizing it, customizing it, as well as optimizing it for SEO, you’re probably going to want to take a serious look at moving to WordPress at some point.
[If you want to know why I choose WordPress over any other blogging platform then you can read my thoughts here!]
You won't regret the move... trust me!
But, you’re not going to want to lose all of those blog posts since they provide valuable legacy content and have already been indexed by Google and the other major search engines. Here is what’s at stake:
- Your previous blog on Blogger has been around for a while and SEO factors in how long (or how old) a website is. In other words, how long it’s been in existence. You’re not going to want to abandon that!
- Some of your previous articles and blog posts may in fact rank very high in Google and other search engines. You’ll want to pass that “juice” into your new WordPress-powered blog!
- You are not able to use any “301 redirects” with Blogger because you don’t control any .htaccess files, the software, or the hosting of the actual blog. Using 301′s typically help move one move to a new web address without losing PageRank. Doh!
- Search bots are one thing, humans are an entirely different thing (and just as valuable)! People are familiar with your current web address and may be in fact be visiting your site directly (or even have it bookmarked)! You’re not going to want to lose those direct traffic sources!
- Current incoming links from other sources, blogs, and websites will have your old address and there’s simply no way for you to possibly inform those sources to update their links on your behalf. In fact, you probably don’t know even half of the sources anyways! What are you going to do?!
- You may even lose RSS Subscribers if you make the jump. How are you going to manage that dropoff?
- Finally, if you were making any money via Google’s Adsense program you can be certain that the loss of traffic (without a full and complete migration with recovered link juice) will ultimately result in loss of revenue generation. You’re not going to want that to happen!
So what’s the solution? How do you go about making the jump without losing all that precious SEO, traffic, and revenue? Here’s how:
1. Get WordPress Installed and Ready:
Of course you’ll first want to get your new self-hosted WordPress blog up and ready to go. All you have to do is follow these instructions here and then come back to this post!
Once you’ve got your new WordPress blog setup you’ll be ready to make the move and migration.
Cool? Cool.
2. Import Content from Blogger to WordPress
I’ve captured nearly every single step visually for your perusal. It’s quite straight-forward but you’re not going to want to make any mistakes!
Ready? Here we go:
As you can see from above I’ve created a dummy Blogger account and blog which has 3 posts. For this demo I’ll be migrating the content from this dummy blogspot blog into a brand new WordPress installation:
As you can see from the image above the installation is brand new and only has 1 post right now! By the end of this extensive walk through it should have 3 new posts via the Blogger blog.
First you’ll want to log into your new WordPress blog, go to Tools >> Import >> Blogger as seen below:
Next, you’ll click Blogger and you will most likely have to download and install the Blogger to WordPress Importer Plugin:
If for some reason you can’t install this plugin directly through your interface you’ll have to download it manually as well as upload it manually to your Plugins folder. You can find it directly here.
Activate it:
Next, you’ll want to begin the Authorization Process between your WordPress-powered blog and your old Blogger account:
Click Authorize and then this page should show up asking you to log in to your Google Account:
Insert your Email and Password and then proceed to this next screen where you will Grant Access to create a secure connection between your Blogger blog and your new WordPress blog:
Hit Grant Access and you’ll be returned to your WordPress blog to begin the migration process:
As you can see, WordPress has correctly identified that the old Blogger blog has 3 posts to migrate! Sweet! Click the Import button on the right and watch as WordPress imports the old content:
Done! Now, if you have multiple authors you may have to assign them to new usernames in WordPress:
When you’re done click Save Changes.
Now, as you can see WordPress displays correctly the 3 blog posts in the admin panel as well as on the front page!
You’ve now completed the migration of all your content from Blogger to WordPress!
Give yourself a pat on the back. You’re awesome! But remember that you’re not done yet! You’re now going to want to do some work in your old Blogger blog to make sure you capture all SEO juice.
3. Update Blogger Info for SEO
To correctly capture all the lose ends from your direct blog link to your organic SEO as well as direct links to your old Blogspot blog you’re going to want to change a few things in your account and settings.
Ready? There’s a little code involved but it’s not too bad!
First, you’ll want to create a new file called blogger.php with the following contents:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 | <?php /* Template Name: Blogger */ global $wpdb; $old_url = $_GET['q']; if ($old_url != "") { $permalink = explode("blogspot.com", $old_url); $q = "SELECT guid FROM $wpdb->posts LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta ". "ON ($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->postmeta.post_id) WHERE ". "$wpdb->postmeta.meta_key='blogger_permalink' AND ". "$wpdb->postmeta.meta_value='$permalink[1]'"; $new_url = $wpdb->get_var($q)? $wpdb->get_var($q) : "/"; header ("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: $new_url"); } ?> |
You can obviously create this in any text editor or any of the code editors of your choosing. I use these tools for FTP and Development if you’re interested to know!
If for some reason you can’t create the file I’ve attached it here in a .zip file.
Now, you’ll need to upload this file into your current WordPress Theme folder. For example, if you’re using the default theme in WordPress then you’ll put it here:
The default theme is called twentyten and I’ve put the blogger.php file inside the theme folder directly.
Here’s another view from the entire URL and domain folder:
As you can see it in the wp-content >> themes >> twentyten >> blogger.php.
Next, you’ll want to create a new Page in WordPress called blogger and choose the Template called Blogger in the “Page Attributes” area:
Don’t miss this! The “Page Attributes” is on the right side:
Hit Publish because you’re done here!
Now, head back to your Blogger Admin Panel:
You’re going to want to click the Design button on the right and head into the Edit HTML area:
Now scroll all the way to the bottom and you’ll see a link that says “Revert to Classic Template” – click that:
Now you’ll see a new “Edit HTML” screen:
You may also notice that the look of your theme on Blogger has also changed:
Now, you’ll want to copy and paste the following code into the “Edit” window completely replacing all the existing code, with your correct URL in the code as well:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 | <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="<$BlogLanguageDirection$>"> <head> <title><$BlogPageTitle$></title> <script type="text/javascript"> <MainOrArchivePage>window.location.href='http://google.com/'</MainOrArchivePage> <Blogger><ItemPage> window.location.href='http://google.com/blogger/?q=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>' </ItemPage></Blogger> </script> <MainPage><link rel="canonical" href="http://google.com/" /></MainPage> <Blogger><ItemPage> <link rel="canonical" href="http://google.com/blogger/?q=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" /> </ItemPage></Blogger> </head><body> <div style="border:#ccc 1px solid; background:#eee; padding:20px; margin:80px;"> <p>This page has moved to a new address.</p> <h1> <MainOrArchivePage><a href="http://google.com"><$BlogTitle$></a></MainOrArchivePage> <Blogger><ItemPage> <a href="http://google.com/blogger/?q=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"><$BlogItemTitle$></a> </ItemPage></Blogger> </h1> </div> </body></html> |
Don’t forget to change out the “google.com” links to your your new web address! This is critical! There are 6 places that need to change in the above code!
It’ll look like this:
Don’t forget to change out “YourDomain.com” to your domain name!
Then hit Save Template Changes and guess what… you’re done!
Essentially what this is doing is redirecting all traffic, requests, and links to your new WordPress blog!
5. Test and Check It!
The next step of course is to actively test your work! Head to your old Blogspot address and it should redirect to your new WordPress blog! Also, if you can test old links to posts click those and they should auto-redirect to the same post but on your WordPress blog!
I’ve created a video to show you in action:
Fantastic! You’ve successfully migrated from Blogger to WordPress without losing some significant SEO!
A Few Things to Remember:
There are a few things that you’ll want to make sure you even after this process is complete:
- Keep your Blogspot blog up! Do not delete it! It still provides value and you will need it to keep the redirection alive!
- Pictures and assorted media may not have fully been moved over, especially if it’s hosted on Blogger directly and/or Picasa. Bring these over manually or just keep your Blogspot blog up to serve that content.
- Let everyone know that you’ve moved! Make the last post you do on Blogger an “Announcement” type post sharing with people the news of the migration. Heck, link them to this post to share with them how you did it (and to encourage them to migrate as well!).
- Update any RSS Feed links and/or Feedburner!
- Freshen up your look on WordPress with your content as your template structure most definitely will not look like the one you had on Blogger.
- If you’re ever interested in seeing how your Blogspot looks like to a SEO bot you can easily turn of Javascript in your browser and visit the site.
Take care and we’ll see you on the other (and better) side with WordPress!
Nice tip. Wish I’d thought of this when I migrated a few years ago!
Jon,
Awesome series.
Makes me sick that I have tried to create this kind of series in the past when you do it so brilliantly
You didn’t mention permalinks.
If the user creates custom permalinks in their new wordpress install, does that affect the redirect?
no. that shouldn’t impact it, especially in the newer versions of wordpress.
Thank you so much for this post! It’s answered basically all the questions I had about my intended move.
Now I just need the finances in order to purchase everything important and I’ll be on my way!
great! let me know if you need any help!
You won’t regret it.
Cost-wise, there are a lot of hosting companies doing great offers at the moment and some will even do monthly plans which make it very affordable.
please list our some hosting companies that offer monthly payment?
i wanted to do it with bluehost but they want a one-time payment.
I don’t know whether it will be a successful one or not. Am gonna buy bluehost unlimited plan within a year. It will have unlimited domains.
We both can share it. I will pay them first, I will get the host and then you can register your domain in my host and we are good to go.
Contact me at arun.latvia@gmail.com for more details.
Thanks
I am really sorry. It is with a year [1 year plan]. Typo mistake. lolz
Wow, this is awesome. I’ve been considering the leap to WordPress for several months now, for all the reasons you mentioned. You hit all of the concerns I had. Thanks for your time in sharing this!
sure thing brock! let me know if you need any help!
John – does WP bring in comments or just posts? For those with lots of comments, it would be sad to leave that all behind.
It brings in both comments and posts.
The system is really pretty good although I have found a couple of times that I have had to run the import more than once because it decided it had finished when it hadn’t.
It’s no biggie though, you start the import again and it simply picks up where it left off.
i’ve had to do this too. it doesn’t duplicate content (thank goodness)!
… unless, of course, you do some major work changing categories after the import and then realize it didn’t import anything.
Then when you re-import it no longer recognizes the posts it imported earlier.
As I discovered in the worst way once!
doh!
as peter mentions, it brings in all that!
I just clicked the “magic button,” and it did bring the comments along with the posts – I had 680 posts and about 2,000 comments. It didn’t, however, bring the links to the people’s blogger profiles along with their comments, but perhaps that’s because I haven’t completed this whole process. (I have to fix the labels-to-categories problem first, then I will redirect my blogspot blog).
Thank you SO MUCH for this, John! I consider it very fortuitous that I procrastinated about moving my site over and you posted this right on the day I decided to actually make the change.
sure thing dorian! let me know if you need anything!
Thanks, John – just to clarify, now that I have asked around – is it indeed the case that migrating from Blogger to WP means you lose the links to all past commenters’ profiles? I am planning to point the old blog towards the new one tomorrow, so perhaps that’s why I am encountering that problem, but the general consensus seems to be that it’s just a “cost” of migrating that you lose the links to people’s profiles. I mainly care because I have blogged for five years in the same place and I love happening upon old posts and seeing comments from years past, and I like to be able to look those people up and reconnect with them.
You know, in a non-stalkerish way.
I’ve never seen links to blogger profiles come across.
That’s just heartbreaking. Ah, well. Focus on the future, I guess. Thanks for clarifying.
It’s actually one of the things I really hate about blogger – their proprietary profile system which isn’t portable between platforms!
So what are all the costs with the migration? Dreamhost costs, WP theme costs, WP.com costs, any other plug-ins that’ll cost up front? I’ve considered this more and more, but want to go at it eyes wide open since I’ve become pretty adept with Blogger and everything I’m using there is free.
Chris,
Assuming you go with Dreamhosts, as you mentioned there, you’re looking at around $9 per month for the hosting. There are cheaper hosts but it’s often true that you get what you pay for.
Your theme… I generally only use free themes but, of course, there are some incredible premium themes out there. I just built a site for a client using Standard Theme 2 and am pretty impressed with it.
For a premium theme, you’re looking at around a $50 one-time fee.
You don’t pay anything for the WordPress software. I use wp.com to handle some of my stats but that is free.
I’ve never used a premium plugin and doubt that you’d ever need to. There are plenty of free ones which do everything you could think of.
So your minimum up-front cost would be around $9 for the first month’s hosting (and then $9 per month thereafter) – assuming you go with a free theme.
Anything over and above that is completely up to you, just as it is with blogger. You can pay someone to do work on your blog or pay for a premium or custom theme but you really don’t have to.
If you’d like, I can give you a test site to play with on one of my domains so you can see how it works and whether or not you need a premium theme before you dive into a hosting contract and the switchover.
wow. what service! free test drive? yikes! awesome!
Thanks for the offer Peter! I can’t (time) make the jump right now, but if/when I’m ready I might take you up on that offer!
Any time, Chris.
I can set you up in minutes.
Contact me through peterpollock.com if you want
chris,
peter has a great explanation below!
the thing to remember is that you’re going to be able to monetize wordpress better and more effectively thus negating your overhead costs over time.
My intent would be to move my church’s site – http://WasecaChurch.org – off of blogger to WP.com, so monetizing it isn’t an option. And since we are a church of under 100 people on average, that means doing everything with frugality (though NOT cheaply).
Eventually I’d consider moving over my personal blog from Blogger – http://mrclm.com – but that isn’t a real high priority until/unless I start blogging with greater regularity again. I’m in a season of life (busy ministry, toddler son) that has put blogging on the back burner.
I respect you Chris.
I believe family should be a person’s number 1 ministry. If it is, the rest will fall in place where it should be.
I preached on prioritizing our lives today (putting God first (aka seek God), take care of the big things – spouse & kids) so I kinda have to practice what I preach I guess!
word!
sweet! you don’t need to move just for monetization purposes… do it for the customization and SEO advantages!
For anyone who is still on the fence about migrating, here is my two cents worth of comment:
I know there are a lot of great blogs out there that are being served through another website, but for some reason, I tend to respect a blog more if they have their on site.
For example:
I like going to a Taco Bell that has its own building instead of one that is shared with a gas station.
I like going to Starbucks to get a fresh brewed coffee, along with the ambiance, instead of getting it in a bottle at Walmart.
And I think most women(i am not one) would prefer to marry a 28 year old man with his own home instead of one who is still living with his parents. (If you are a 28 year old male still living with your parents, that is fine. If you are a 28 year old male living with your parents and you don’t know why you are still single; now you know.)
Hope I have pushed some of you off of the fence.
these are great points and valid as well.
Thanks for the orderly plan of attack! I’ve been meaning to do this for a couple of my old blogger blogs I stopped publishing to since they changed their self-hosting policy several months ago. This gives me incentive to get it done and bring some niche blogs back to life! U da man.
sure thing kenny! hope things are well with you !
Looking at migrating from Squarespace to my own self-hosted WordPress. Squarespace exports into a Moveable Type format which seems to import easily into WordPress. Since I’ll be shutting down my Squarespace account since it’s paid, do you have any recommendations for maintaining SEO?
yikes… other than keeping the site up you don’t have much you can do………. that stinks! how much content?
About 75 posts. Mostly YouTube embeds of videos I’ve done
i don’t think that’ll be too much of a problem, especially with the video… how much traffic do you get a month?
Hi thanks for this excellent and up-to-date walkthrough. I followed it line by line, but now when I type in a link to my old blogspot post, it goes to the homepage (top-level) of my wordpress-powered site, not the migrated blogspot post.
Do I need to turn on custom SEO permalinks? Do I need to add an .htaccess file or something? Right now I’m using the /?q=123 type address on wordpress because I like the short URLs. Meanwhile, on blogspot they were the SEO-style ../title-text.html permalinks.
The “permalink” (?page_id=1402) to the “blogger” page we created shows a blank white screen.
Once again thanks for the great walkthrough.
what is the blogger address? you can change the /blogger in the blogspot template to your /?page_id if you’d like….. and the “blogger” page should be blank.
The old blogger address is http://bhaga-vad-gita.blogspot.com
For example, if I type the old post address
http://bhaga-vad-gita.blogspot.com/2010/06/rath.html
it redirects to
http://hermeneuo.com/blogger/?q=http://bhaga-vad-gita.blogspot.com/2010/06/rath.html
But what displays is my homepage, hermeneuo.com
When I replace the 3 instances of
in the blogspot template with
, it redirects to http://hermeneuo.com/?page_id/?q=http://bhaga-vad-gita.blogspot.com/2010/06/rath.html, but once again displays the homepage and not the post rath.html
Meanwhile, that post imported to the “permalink”
http://hermeneuo.com/?p=450
and I see custom fields on the WordPress “edit post” page:
Name: blogger_blog Value bhaga-vad-gita.blogspot.com
Name: Blogger permalink Value: /2010/06/rath.html
I won’t be too worried if importing doesn’t work, I was simply trying to concentrate all of my interests and projects onto one domain, I find this to be much easier to maintain and a much more integrated approach than having a separate blog for each aspect of myself.
That said, my fundamental error may be in not activating WordPress custom permalinks. I wanted to avoid “semantic” permalinks because I would like to be able to go back and recategorize the posts later without creating broken links.
try doing a pretty permalink /blogger and that should be fine.
John, can you explain what you mean by pretty permalink /blogger? I’m having the exact same issue and I’ve tried a few things in the blogger template and in the wordpress permalinks but nothing works.
did you change your permalink structure?
Hi, John – I have another permalink question. Before I went through the process you’ve described here, I used Justinsomnia’s plugin to maintain my permalinks.
After I activated the plugin, it seemed like everything was working okay – at that point, I had imported my blogger blog to WordPress and I went and checked links within posts (links to other posts of mine, I mean).
Now, it seems I’ve lost my permalinks – not only the ones within my own site but from other sites,as well. Did running the plugin and then going through your process mess stuff up? Should I deactivate the plugin?
Hello again – just stopping by to say, tentatively, that I think I figured it out. I’d switched my blog from scrutinies.blogspot.com to http://www.scrutinies.net about a month before doing this migration, because I’d read somewhere that it was a good idea to do that part ahead of time so that Blogger could redirect all the permalinks, or something like that.
Anyway, so when I installed your code snippet, my blogspot site was still thinking of itself as http://www.scrutinies.net, or something. After I went in and changed the publishing settings back to blogspot.com instead my custom domain name, it seemed to work. I did still use the Justinsomnia plugin as well, because I don’t really know what I’m doing.
But, just in case someone else is reading this who’s in the same spot, that’s how I fixed the problem.
Oh, and the posts I’d written on Blogger AFTER I’d switched to my own custom domain name (but pre-migration) also are redirecting, because the link structure…something something something, I don’t know. All I know is – all seems to be well. And I’m sure my having typed that last sentence means I am about to break the Internet again.
great! let me know how it progresses!
dorian, did you get this figured out?
I really don’t know. I think so. The new problem is that http://www.scrutinies.net now goes to an error page. My husband says it’s fixed now but may take up to a day to resolve. (I no longer get the error when on my own computer, I guess because we have our own network set up within our house, or something).
I do believe the redirection of my old blogspot.com posts is working now, though. I wish I’d just waited to set up my new domain until I made the WordPress switch – seems like that might have been easier. I also had originally just entered http://scrutinies.net in your code wherever it says “yourdomain.com”, but my blog is actually http://scrutinies.net/blog-2 . So I had to fix that, too.
This has certainly been a learning experience. Thanks for following up with me – and I am looking forward to your upcoming post on permalinks.
I have been instructed to say, “my husband goofed up the DNS entry.” He says he accidentally set http://www.scrutinies.net as a cname instead of an A record. Ha, ha! Isn’t he a card! He also says, “we have our own Windows 2003 primary domain controller.” Party on!
I apologize to all of the people who have had to read the word “scrutinies” more times on this page than anyone should be subjected to. And it’s hard to type correctly. But it’s my home.
LOL.
I wouldn’t have admitted it, personally!
I would have just said “I messed with some settings and made some changes…”
I think it’s that he wanted someone who actually understood what he was talking about to hear his explanation of how he fixed the error. I just kind of cock my head to the side and say, “huh. Okay, so is it working now?”
hah! you’ve got a great husband!
no need to apologize! love that you’ve made the transition!
Hi John,
this is a fantastic post – thanks for writing this! I have one small question: the blogger.php file would need to be added to any theme you might decide to switch to at any point down the road, correct?
Thanks!
Hi Melissa,
Since the file has to go in the theme… yes you would have to put it in any theme you use down the road.
I hadn’t considered that when I read this post… but theoretically you won’t change themes for a while, by which time your site will be running on its own seo rankings and so it will be largely immaterial if you forget to add it to the new theme.
peter’s got the answer below.
Hi John:
This is awesome! I have been very hesitant to do the switch for all the reasons that you mentioned. Now that I know for certain that these reasons don’t apply anymore it is just a matter of doing the work now!
Thanks!
Kevin
Kevin, Kevin, Kevin.
I’d given up hope of you ever moving… and had given up trying to convince you.
Then in one swift move, John changes your mind.
I see whose opinion you respect the most….
hahaha!
don’t mind peter.
I’m glad you DID mind me and have moved now!
I’m certain it will open up whole new worlds for you!
So what if you just have a blogger blog and don’t have your own domain name? Nor need one? I’m not sure which steps to leave out….
None.
The process is still the same.
but you’ll need a domain to migrate to wordpress… right?
Oh, yeah, I didn’t read the question right.
You can’t go self hosted without your own domain name.
Your domain name is how the net knows where to find your site.
Hi John:
I think I am all ready to do the final steps for migrating my blog to wordpress but my question is: can I still post on my old blogger site after I make all the changes?
Thanks!
Kevin
No, you can’t… and you won’t need to.
What I normally do is tell people to put a ‘we’re moving’ post up a day or two in advance just to let people know what’s going on.
If you try to post after the move, the redirect you’re setting up on blogger will redirect traffic to that post to the same post on your wordpress blog.
pete’s got the answer here.
How about moving one wordpress blog to another domain name?
How do you take SEO with you then?
301s……!
Just one sitewide 301 or is there a way to do it individually?
one should do the trick, site-wide.
I assume it is OK to set the page to Private so that the page doesn’t show up in the menu bar at the top of my blog. Is that correct. I don’t want the page to be visible. That would be kinda dorky. I didn’t see anything in your instructions about that. Anyway, thanks so much for posting this!
of course.!
I’m so glad I found this detailed tutorial, as I’m about to make the move myself. Question….will it hurt me to have duplicate content? I’ve heard something about search engines not liking that. Also, what happens to categories? I had way too many on blogger and have narrowed them down on WP. And my last question, is it fine to delete some of the newly-moved content once I migrate it? Thanks so much for your help!
If you follow this tutorial, you effectively won’t have duplicate content.
You see, when someone tries to view one of your posts on blogger, they will be redirected to the same post on your wordpress blog.
Search engines will be able to see that there is a valid redirect and won’t treat it a a duplicate.
You can delete some of the content after migration, but for a while at least, that content will still show up in search engines.
You just need to make sure you have a valid 404 page set up and everything will be fine. (I believe John is doing a post on 404′s soon!)
Thanks for your timely answer, Peter. That makes sense. I have a valid 404 page, I believe. And I even created a really clever one and installed a Plugin to ‘set’ it, but can’t seem to get that to work. I may need to hire someone at the end of all this to fix the couple things I couldn’t make work. I’m so thankful to have found Tentblogger!
Let me know if you need help with anything, if it’s just a couple of little things you need doing, I’ll be happy to help you with them.
Email me through peterpollock.com!
Thanks a bunch Peter. I’ll be in touch if I should need help. Praying for a quiet couple hours so I can focus on this tutorial without constant kid interruptions. : )Code work takes all my brain power!
I’d just like to say that I really dislike Genesis and Thesis themes.
They make simple WordPress functions so difficult sometimes!
Your blog looks AWESOME though, I really like it.
Peter, Thank you SO much for saving the day and fixing my goofs. Thanks for the compliments : ) You know what you’re doing with all the code and stuff. I’m scared of it now ; )
I don’t really know what I’m doing with the code stuff, I just work through it step by step and sometimes get lucky!
melissa,
thanks for stopping by! isn’t our community so helpful? peter is one of the best!
John (and others), I hate to bug you, but I would really appreciate it if you could outline the process for those of us who are dealing with blogspot blogs that have been publishing via a custom domain for years. I just migrated a multi-author blog from blogspot to WordPress – something I had the confidence to attempt because of your trusty tutorial.
But what I’m not sure about is the point at which one should switch from the custom domain back to blogspot.
In this case, I built the new site at my hostgator, um, space. Then, I did the import. (which went fine).
Then, I switched the blogspot domain from their custom URL (theirsite.org) back to theirsite.blogspot.com.
Then, I did the redirect as you’ve outlined it.
And now, I’m pointing theirsite.orgt to the new site at hostgator. (theirsite.org had been hosted at 1and1.com, so it is taking a few days to transfer).
I’m just not sure that was the right order in which to implement the great migration. Could you clarify this for me?
Of course, in this case, it’s all the more complicated because these guys have a whole new site, theirbigsite.com, and the blog is just one page. So theirbigsite.com works fine, and I’m trying to point theirsite.org (the old custom URL, currently at 1and1) to theirbigsite.com/blog.
Hi Dorian,
I’m going to leave this one to John
What you’re trying to do sounds like fun.
I’m not sure it’s going to work the way you want it to. I don’t know how WordPress handles domain aliases like this.
I’m interested in what the solution is though. I think you’re going to have to have an add-on domain of theirsite.org which houses the blog rather than aliasing it to a subdirectory on another domain.
Oh, it’s TONS of fun! Really! Mainly because…I am making my husband deal with the redirect stuff.
I guess it’s not so much for this particular (crazy) situation, but for the future – when you’re dealing with a blogspot blog that’s been publishing on a custom domain for a long time, at one point should you switch back to blogspot.com?
(And thanks, Peter, for the fast response!)
peter is so fast, isn’t he?
dorian,
to be quite honest, i think i’m a bit confused as to what’s “broken” if that makes sense.
putting the custom domain back to a blogspot domain would “break” the new re-direct to wordpress, correct? why would you do that?
the only time i’d do that is if you were comfortable with “killing” the redirect to the new site because of age or if you felt it was “time” to start anew.
I don’t think anything’s broken. Is it?
I’m not pointing the custom domain back to a blogspot domain…welll, wait, that’s not true. I am doing that right now because we’re waiting for the custom domain to transfer from 1and1.com It’s crazy, dumb, possibly wrongheaded, and inefficient, but right now (as I understand it), when you type in theirdomain.org, it points to theirsite.blogspot.com, which points to theirbignewsite.com/blog. (They wanted to go ahead and move into their shiny new WordPress home before everything was ready…and I let them).
Yes, I know.
So, once theirdomain.org is in our hands, we will just point theirdomain.org to theirbignewsite.com/blog. Eliminating the blogspot middleman.
This is the plan.
My main thing, though is – what order should I usually go in when moving a blog from blogger to WP, as far as when to “switch off” the custom domain name? Before or after going in and replacing the blogger template with your code? I reallyreallyreallyreallyreally appreciate your help.
ok. that makes sense. go for it. get rid of the middle man…!
Wait, seriously? That actually makes sense? Excellent! I hope to never have to do that again, but I am glad to know it wasn’t entirely wrong. Thanks!
I just had to tell you I DID IT! It worked like a charm. the only thing that was a little unclear to me at the end, was exactly where to put that code, because some of the other code stayed at the top. But I just kept looking at your screenshot and did it! I can’t thank you enough for doing such a detailed tutorial. And I’m thrilled to have my old site linking right to the new. Genius, you are! THANK YOU!!!!!!!!
Yay! Congratulations!
melissa,
i’m so happy for you!
Hi John. What a helpful post! I only wish we had found it BEFORE I moved. Ugh. I think the transition went very well but two big things went wrong.
1. I lost 1000 feedburner feed subscribers! We can’t figure it out.
2. All my buttons and old posts are going to a blogger re-direct page. We’ve installed re-direct plugins and still can’t get it to work.
I think my daughter (who moved my blog) did something backwards. She didn’t change the blogger account to a domain first and then proceed to move to wordpress. She moved it to wordpress and then did the domain change.
She got all my posts and comments over to my new blog, but again old linked posts and my buttons are all linking to the re-direct page and my feedburner subscriber went from 1350 to 129 the day I moved. :’( Very sad.
Can you give any advice?
THANKS!
Lynnette
at this point you could walk through some of these steps and it might salvage a few subscribers and links… how long ago did you move?
The move just happened about 10 days ago. Does that make a difference?
The missing subscribers was an interesting one…
My investigations suggest that the issue came from Google Friend Connect.
At some point, Google started moving all the blogs people were ‘following’ through friend connect into Google Reader.
Problem is, it used their blogspot.com feed address in google reader.
Somehow that meant they were getting reported to feedburner as RSS subscribers by google reader right up until the site moved from blogger to WordPress.
Weirdly, they are now no longer getting reported to feedburner BUT the latest posts are updating in Google reader.
I’m confused by it so I suggested Lynnette ask people to resubscribe just to make sure!
On this step (copied below) you say to remember to change your domain all 6 places. There are only 4 places to change your domain. We just followed that step for my blog and now my domain http://www.lynnettekraft.com is defaulting to http://www.lynnettekraft/blogger That page had nothing so we created a /blogger page on my wordpress blog and then had it default to my main page. It is royally rigged and we have NO idea what to do now. Ugh. Help?
// <![CDATA[
window.location.href='http://YourDomain.com/'
window.location.href='http://YourDomain.com/blogger/?q='
// ]]>
This page has moved to a new address.
<$BlogTitle$>
<$BlogItemTitle$>
Did you create the blogger.php file on your wordpress blog (in step 3 of this tutorial)?
Did you then create the page called blogger and set it to use the blogger.php page template?
Yes. We did all of that but then when we went to my blog (www.lynnettekraft.com), there was a blank page with a bunch of code. So, we undid everything, but that was when my wordpress blog (www.lynnettekraft.com) defaulted to http://www.lynnettekraft.com/blogger Clueless over here.
you followed all the steps? why was it defaulting to /blogger?
Peter helped me out. I don’t really have a clue what happened, but very happy it’s all better now.
Lynnette,
Have you read John’s post about Feedburner? I switched on a couple of things for you today in there but you might want to go through what it says.
I won’t go into everything…
but the basic problem was that they had a 301 redirect plugin installed which was redirecting everything.
It was like unraveling a rope that hasn’t been wound up properly and has gotten all kinds of tangled…
We got there in the end though now and the blog looks SWEET!
I was nervous to move my blog but thought your step-by-step instructions were pretty straight forward. The image captures really helped and everything migrated just as you said. Thanks!
ah, this is awesome!
Uh oh. I’m getting the redirect from my main blogspot page but none of the individual posts are redirecting to the new site. And when I click on the new “blogger page located here: http://nippyfish.net/index.php/blogger/ I’m seeing only the code from the blogger.php file. I’ve gone over the steps so many times I can’t see what I’ve done wrong. I’m pretty stuck.
Hey I fixed it! It’s working perfectly now. I snagged this code, which was only a little different from what you had, and put it in my blogger.php file. (Perhaps it was the lowercase “blogger” that fixed it. I don’t know.)
posts LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta “.
“ON ($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->postmeta.post_id) WHERE “.
“$wpdb->postmeta.meta_key=’blogger_permalink’ AND “.
“$wpdb->postmeta.meta_value=’$permalink[1]‘”;
$new_url = $wpdb->get_var($q)? $wpdb->get_var($q) : “/”;
header (“HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
header(“Location: $new_url”);
}
?>
Anyway… I could not have don this without your meticulous instructions. I have no formal web design training and don’t know what most of this stuff does, but with your help I got it done. Thanks!
I am trying to move from blogspot to my own wordpress. My theme is prophoto and they don’t recommend doing anything in that file, and if I do and something goes haywire- they will not help fix it. SO- if I leave that step out, will I still do the one where I replace the template at blogger?
yes, you’ll have to replace the template on blogger.
I did what you said replaced the template and now… IT IS ALL GONE. LOST. NOW NOTHING WORKS. WHEN YOU CLICK A LINK IT SAYS “SORRY PAGE NOT FOUND”. EXCELLENT NOW WHAT?
sharon, sorry to hear that. your content should still be there… i see it redirects… were you successful?
3 problems:
1. links within posts linking to older posts are broken, I manually fixed the first two I found… do I have to do this with them all?
2. Do I go to blogger and direct it to my new domain as though I am publishing on my own domain or skip that. you don’t mention it in your tutorial but others I found did.
3. feedburner won’t play nice and won’t let me change to my new URL.
got any ideas?
was I an idoit to think I could migrate this myself?
*idiot*
no, you were brave!
ah, then you don’t have the redirect correct yet? have you done the new page in wordpress yet?
no this is what I get when I go to my themes folder from my dashboard:
(in big red ugly letters)
“You should never need to edit ProPhoto theme files using this page. We do not support questions or problems that arise from hand-editing theme files. More info on why you shouldn’t edit these files and how to accomplish what you want without editing them can be found here.”
So that is why I asked you initially about leaving that php folder thing in. I didn’t understand the 301 redirect thing.
I am just scared of messing in that folder and messing up my template.
you can change the source feed in feedburner:
http://tentblogger.com/feedburner/
I went to myfeedburner page and clicked on edit feed and entered the new URL and it does not work. when I do and hit save it says this:
“Received HTTP error: “Not Found” while fetching source feed.”
so now what? I do appreciate your help here. thank you for responding.
it’s because the site’s not up yet.
Is it because nothing new has been posted on the wordpress blog yet? I was hoping to have this all figured out by tomorrow. I was hoping to have a “reveal” type day on my new blog for my blog 2 yr anniversary and my 40th birthday.
and I may have lost all my comments on discus?
no, they should be all there. you imported comments, correct? you have to install disqus on wordpress as well.
I have installed disqus but my template isn’t allowing it to show up on the site. I am using Prophoto3.
i’m not super-familiar with that blog theme, sorry!
Hi guys, I’m bookmarking this post to be used in a couple of days. Just one question (at least for the moment). Since I have been using my own domain in Blogger, do I first switch that blog to a blogspot address? and then go to step 1 of this tutorial?
I’ve been trying to find the answer here but haven’t been able to. Sorry if it’s my mistake (most likely).
Thanks.
you’ll have to see where you’re domain is registered and how it’s pointing to blogger.
My domain is with Godaddy and I just followed blogger’s guidelines. I guess my question is: since I want to use that same domain when I migrate to a self hosted WordPress blog, is my first step to change my current blogger blog to a blogspot address in order to ‘liberate’ my domain? I hope my question makes sense and thank you.
yes. you’ll have to “release” it.
This is indeed a nice tute. But, I have one problem.
Whenever I click on old blog posts, I am not able to get that posts redirected, instead I am seeing some sort of code.
http://downsland.blogspot.com/2010/11/downloadwatch-golmaal-3-2010-full-movie.html
This is one of my post links on my older blogs.
Please help me friend.
looks like you copied and pasted some code incorrectly…?
Can you plz tell me which code…. Tried it many times. Trying it again. Please help me.
Well, you said it right. I was copying the wrong code. So, i just used your provided zip file. But, now my posts pages are blank. Please check out this example link:
http://downsland.blogspot.com/2010/11/downloadwatch-golmaal-3-2010-full-movie.html
I thought problem was due to permalinks. So, I tried even fix.php – a file which was matching blogger links with wordpress links. But, no luck.
Waiting for your reply.
hav eyou created the wordpress page and template?
Thanks for your reply. I have uploaded the blogger.php file and also created a page with title blogger. Also, selected “blogger” as template.
Waiting for your reply.
you’ve created teh right template at blogger?
Well, you can check out my blogger template code here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?62iwwwsv2niam0i
Please tell me if I have done anything wrong.
i believe this is where you are messed up. check the above tutorial about changing to a legacy theme and copying the code.
I guess you are talking about reverting to default template. Right?? Well, I have done that too.
Tried once again. But no luck still.
I would like to inform you one thing that my domain is an addon domain. Is this the reason for error??
Also, I have uploaded file “blogger.php” to:
/public_html/techotoys.net/wp-content/themes/twentyten
Please tell me if I am doing wrong.
You are not using the TwentyTen theme. Have you uploaded it to your Thesis theme folder?
If you’re still having problems, I’d be happy to log in and check out what you’ve done and see if I can sort it out for you, if you can give me access to your blog and blogger account.
I’m not sure what I have done wrong, I followed the instructions step by step. But all my links on my wordpress site are 404. When I search for some keywords to bring up my site in Google, and click the link, those sites are 404 pages. If I type MyUrl.blogspot.com it redirects me to my WordPress home page like it should, but no other links will work.
Here is information that I can give, I appreciate any help.
I have my own domain, I was a Blogspot.com blog a couple of years ago, but bought my domain name through Go daddy and stuck with blogger. I have been wanting to move it over to wordpress and decided to be brave. So I bought hosting for my domain through Go daddy, and installed WordPress on it.
In blogger, I changed to point my blog to blogspot address.
and my husband set up the DNS stuff, when that was all said and done, I could then see the Welcome screen for WordPress blog by going to my domain.
In wordpress, I then installed the blogger importer plugin mentioned above, granted access and pushed the magic button.
All my posts and comments came through just fine and displayed at my domain on wordpress home page, however, of course the links
aren’t working yet, just getting 404 on everything but the main URL. I contiuned on with the steps..
I made a file named blogger.php, inserted the code you said above and put it in the theme file that I am using folder in my file manager.
Next I created a Page in wordpress named blogger and I chose the template “blogger” from the drop down and saved it.
THIS NEXT PART IS THE PART I AM UNSURE OF?
I saved my blogger template before I did anything.
Then I went into my blogger admin and reverted to classic,
I copied the code above and replaced ALL THE CODE That was there
in the blogger editor with the code you listed above. I changed the URLs in the code to my
own domains, (ABOVE it said there is 6 places, But I could only
find 4 in the code???) then saved the template.
What I am left with, is my domain on WordPress, which on the home page, all the posts look fine, but if you go to click on the Post title of any of the posts, it takes you to 404, If I click on any of the categories on the side, I get 404. If I try to go to the Archives and click on the months, I get 404. Even the Pagination at the bottom will not go past page 1, everything else is 404. I can only see my main Front page URL, and any links that take me to another site. I have custom permalinks set to “Month and Name” option
I’m not sure what other info to give. My site is http://www.thefrugalfreeloader.com but it’s currently in maintenance mode, because it is in terrible shape.
Can someone advise me what I did wrong or where I need to go from here? Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to cover all the bases I could think of.
Thank you for any help you can give!
yikes! might take me some time to look through this.
First thing I’d try is going back into the permalinks settings and just clicking on save again.
You’d be surprised how often that helps.
If that doesn’t work, try switching the theme you’re using to something else and see if it works in a different theme. That will eliminate whether it’s a theme issue or not.
Next, deactivate all of your plugins and see if that fixes it. If it does, then reactivate them one-by-one to see which one is messing things up.
If that doesn’t work, come back here and we’ll see what we can do next!
try the code above again. i may have been missing a few lines. 2nd bucket.
John,
I just transferred a customer’s site over.
They were already using their own url and so post url’s were in the form:
yourdomain.com/month/day/posttitle.html
I’ve followed all of this through, but the problem I’m having is that we no longer use the .html extension.
Do you have a .htaccess redirect or something which can strip off the .html when people visit from an old link somewhere?
it would be something like this:
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# Rewrite something/something/post-slug.html format links to /post-slug.html
# old: RewriteRule ^\d{4}\/\d{2}\/(.*) /$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^\d{4}\/\d{2}\/(.*?)(\.html)?\/?$ /$1.html [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
Thanks, John.
I couldn’t get that to work, so I ended up going with:
RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9]+) http://gettingdownwithjesus.com/$1
Which mostly does the trick.
Mostly.
yeah. my example was just that…. an example. awesome!
Eekers, I think I am lost. I paid blogger so I could own my domain (www.paddedtushstats.com). So when I go to wordpress to register my blog it is asking me to pay $12 a year. Does that sound right?
they are looking to register/manage the domain. if you already have the domain then you should have access to the registrar/hosting to change it over to another hosting/blogging system.
Hi! thanks to this tutorial, I was able to transfer to wordpress. The homepage has no problem but the contents won’t redirect…I wonder if it’s because of the subdomain?
For example I search sublimewanderer zaragosa, the pages show in google when I click I come up with http://sublime.keenwriters.com/blogger/?q=http://sublimewanderer.blogspot.com/2011/03/unforgettable-nature-trip.html – but shows a 500 internal error.
Thanks for your help.
ah. you might have to add .html to the end of your permalink structure in wordpress.
You’re doing something funny with subdomains.
Your homepage is http://sublime.keenwriters.com/
but your posts switch to http://keenwriters.com/sublime/…
That means you get a 500 error instead of a 404
good point. i didn’t even notice that. whoops!
oh, ja, that’s what I wanted to ask too, how do I redirect the subfolder to the subdomain? Thanks Peter and John…
funny how this wasn’t answered, I figured out the redirection but still shows 404, thanks anyway.
oh wow, didn’t even see this comment! did you get it fixed?
Thank you so much for this helpful article! Already migrated to my new site, and in the process of setting things up. Couldn’t have done it without you
congrats!
Thank you for the wonderful post and listing all the important stuff to being a successful blogger.
This post will serve as a great help and guideline to all bloggers
sure thing sam! make sure you get a gravatar: http://tentblogger.com/gravatar/
Thank you for this simply written tutorial for those of us that are more than a bit challenged with coding and such. These steps worked like a charm the first time – thanks so much!
that’s awesome! congrats!
thanks for this tutorial i was able to migrate my blogger blog to wp, well at least most of it, see, when i checked my archives in wp + compare with the blogger one, some post are missing. there is one month where only 7 of my original 55 posts were migrated, what do you think should i do to correct this? thanks so much
did the migration not work completely?
My backlinks are not working and my Pagerank has gone to n/a. It is supposed to be PR3.
When I clicked a link from Blogger, is it supposed to be like this? http://new domain/?q=http://XXXX.blogspot.com/2011/05/post title.html
Does it need time to revert back to my existing PageRank?
Oh yes, I just found out one more problem, when I click view from Blogger, the URL reads as: http://new domain/?q=http://XXXXXX.blogspot.com/2011/05/title of the post.html, but it DOESN’T show he ACTUAL page of that particular post, it shows the first page of the blog.
What I mean is when I try clicking any of the post from Blogger, it ALL points to the front page only.
Where did I go wrong?
did you follow the steps correctly? did you add .html in wordpress?
The redirecting of permalinks is okay now. My main problem is my backlinks and PageRank. I tried checking with the backlink tool, and my new domain shows NOT a single one. But the Blogspot domain stills has all its backlinks intact.
I even tried clicking back from those who link to my site, they work just fine. It redirected smoothly.
If you don’t mind me asking. When you say, add .html in wordpress, what does you mean? Sorry buddy, I’m a newbie and “technically-challenged” too.
you can do this via your permalinks settings.
Hey John,
Thanks for putting all of this stuff out there. Your posts have been a huge help.
I’m running into a problem similar to what Lester described above. I created a new self-hosted wordpress site for my wife. She had been using blogger so I followed your instructions to migrate everything over. The process itself went very smoothly. The problem I’m encountering is for specific links to blogspot posts.
To begin with the redirect for specific links came back with: PARSE ERROR: syntax error, unexpected T_CONTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING in xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/blogger.php on line 14. So I played around with the code for blogger and removed the “/blogger/” from the domain name and it started redirecting to the main page.
Any idea of what I can do to solve this issue?
did you set your permalinks right? did you create a blogger page in wordpress?
Yes I did create a blogger page. My permalinks are set to what you advise here – http://tentblogger.com/permalinks/
Do the permalinks need to be different?
there might be an issue in your blogger template.
Is it a must to create a new Page in WordPress called blogger? Because it show in my menu bar.
depending on your theme you can hide that page.
Is it possible to import 2 different blogger blogs into 1 wordpress blog using this method? As long as I follow the steps for each one as outlined?
Okay I got that to work (importing two blogs)…The main problem I’m having is like some of these people are having as well, everything is being directed to the main page only. You suggest two things: 1. Fix the permalinks, but I’m not sure what I should be fixing them to. And 2. you asked someone “did you add .html in wordpress?”. I followed each of the steps exactly as outlined above as far as I can tell the only thing is it’s not doing is going to the right article. Sorry to be a pest but your advice on the perma links would be much appreciated!
the permalink instructions should be straightforward…
did your previous blog have .html extension?
The permalink instructions are very straightforward unless you are not familiar with the importing process from blogger to WordPress and wondering if the way you have your permalinks set up is what is causing your issues…I haven’t seen that directly addressed or if it has I guess I didn’t understand the answer.
And yes I just figured out that my old blog posts were ending in .html.
When you say “add .html in word press” are you talking about in the permalinks? Is this one in the same problem being addressed?
Truly am sorry to be dense but this might as well be written in Greek to a lot of us–doing the best I can here! Thank you again for your time and very helpful article!
Okay in step 5 it says there is a “video” for you. Is this perhaps where you talk about the permalinks…I can’t see an embedded video or see a link to it, I’m using Firefox 4 and tried IE, maybe this is where the information is I’m missing?
i’ll double check. yes, adding html is in the permalinks.
fixed the video!
I’m wondering if your method migrating to WordPress considered legitimate? I have read the Blogger Forum that there are cases where they got their blogs banned by Google. Please enlighten.
totally legit.
I am using Cutline Theme. So how do I hide the word “Blogger” from my navigation bar?
link?
Would you mind let me know what do you mean by link?
link to your blog?
Hi John,
I’ve done everything as you’ve outlined here but I am having a problem similar to others in that the initial redirect from blogger to WP works, but the permalinks only redirect the wp homepage. The blogger posts end with .html so I have changed the WP permalinks to
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
the same thing happens. I’ve put a slash after html and before it. still doesn’t work.
I tried changing to the default permalink and then changing /blogger to /?page_id in the blogger template and that didn’t work either.
I’m pretty sure it’s something small but I can’t see it.
oh one more thing. The client was already using their own domain name in blogger. They are using a different domain name for the WP site. Should I have released their old domain name back to the blogspot.com domain name? I didn’t think it was an issue because the new site uses a different name and the initial redirect does work. Appreciate any help you can give.
ah. it should work even though it’s a different name.
that’s what I thought. I’m guessing I’ve got something wrong with the permalink but I just can’t see it. It’s driving me crazy.
what is your site name?
link i mean?
the new site is http://www.westchesterfoodie.com
the old blogger site is http://www.westchesterfoodieonline.com
the Westchester Restaurant Follow-Up post on the home page has a link in it you can try.
do you have a link from the old blog to test?
http://www.westchesterfoodieonline.com/2011/05/training-food-cavatelli-sweet-pea-and.html
thanks for helping with this.
hmm. i see it moving to the new domain… but i can’t guess what’s wrong without seeing the rest. is your blogspot template right?
can i email you exactly what I have?
I had to go into the All in One SEO pack in WordPress and tell it to name my posts as /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
In blogger, when John had us change out the “google.com” links to your new web address, I was typing in my web address and not adding in the “/page name” that I wanted it to go to. For me it was my web address/blog.
Those two changes made it turn out beautifully.
Thanks for the tutorial!
Sonya
sure thing sonya! rock on…….!
Hello,
First, thanks for a very detailed article. A lot of work!
I’m in the middle of moving from Blogger to WP and it is such a headache for beginner!
I’d like to ask if it is crucial to revert to “classic template” in Blogger? I have a lot of photos on my blogger account and I think that reverting back to old template will damage all content (I customised my current blogger template).
Secondly, I’ve found a plug SEO blogger to wordpress, what do you think about it?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-blogger-to-wordpress-301-redirector/installation/
Thanks!
Atria
i’ve seen the plugin but don’t use it, for myself and for my clients.
finally, since you’re migrating to wordpress does it matter what the template is? not really. just use the classic!
John’s right, since you’re migrating and doing a redirect, no-one will ever be able to see your blogger site again.
That doesn’t mean your posts will be lost, because when people try to read them, they’ll be able to do so, it will just be at your new site.
If you are really worried about your blogger template, there is an option on the templates page in Blogger to download a complete copy of it!
this is true!
Thank you so much for your replies.
You’re right, I’d no longer need “old” blog, but I still want it to be sweet;) So I’ll do redirecting at the very end.
I have two quick questions still:
1) Is it any way not to loose blogger google followers? They are subsribed via “Google friend connect”. Do I have to change something in settings or just redirecting will do the job?
2)What will happen to links inside the post after redirecting? Till know, I’ve just imported content from blogger to WP, I see pictures, posts etc., but when I click on link in the post it redirects to my old blog. Does redirecting fix it?
For example: when people click on “read it in the post X” I want them to see this post on WP, not old one in blogger.
Sorry for being a bit chaotic and sorry for my English skills (I’m not a native speaker), but I hope you get what I mean.
Thanks!
ps. I’ve read whole article once again and as far as I understand, links will be fine. So skip this question, please:) Thanks!
But John, still, any ideas how to redirect traffic from “google friend connects”? Seriously, I read your blog too much. I should write my thesis instead. It is about sociology of religious movements. Quite far away from WordPress.
hahahahahahhahah!
i’m not sure how to redirect traffic from google friend connects… hmm.
Hi there I have a stupid question for you – I would like to migrate all contents from a blogger blog to a new wordpress self hosted site, but I once I’ve done this I would hope for the Blogger blog to remain intact with all its contents for a while – before I re-direct the url from blogger to WordPress.
I am really afraid of the original blogger site to end up all mahsed up when I transfer data.
Can anyone explain what will happen to the original blog in this process?
Many thanks
Ok sorry I did this and nothing changed from the original.
BUT the comments did not get transfered properly. It’s quite distressful, you just get “Thomas said —(nothing)” then “Eve said — (nothing)” etc, etc.
… entire threads of EMPTY COMMENTS….
Does anyone have any idea why this may happen?
hmm. you did a typical transfer between blogger and wordpress? no errors in the migration process?
Also I have another question – Now that I have imported content from Blogger, and then started tweaking it on the wordpress side of things, what will happen when I link both up?
Will posts not be affected at all, which I hope? Is step 3 really just a matter of links and urls?
Yes, step 3 is all about the url’s.
All it does is ensure that if people try to view your blog on your blogger site or using the url format you used on blogger, they get automatically sent to the right page on your WordPress blog.
It’s like moving offices and putting a sign on the door of the old office telling people where to go to find you.
Thanks for that it sounds reassuring
Yes I basically followed all the steps you indicated in part 1. and 2. above and everything seemed to be working fine except for this…. AARg.
You can try doing the import from blogger again.
That may import all the missing comments.
Oh no I can’t do that I have been working on the posts since hours to try and make them look less wonky after import.
Not possible to import comments separately from posts?
In theory. If you rerun the import, it will only import stuff it hasn’t already imported
Sometimes it doesn’t work like that though.
Can we have a look at the site?
Yes you can thanks very much!! The new work-in-progress site is shown in my profile and the old one is at http://lovingdalston.blogspot.com/
Do you need some wp admin login info to check this from the inside?
FYI – I get this message on my WordPress Blogger Import Tool:
“Restart
We have saved some information about your Blogger account in your WordPress database. Clearing this information will allow you to start over. Restarting will not affect any posts you have already imported. If you attempt to re-import a blog, duplicate posts and comments will be skipped.”
I am VERY afraid of loosing all the work I have done on posts after import. I have had to edit posts one by one for the whole of 2011 to get the right layout. Can you advise on how to get these comments back? Can you see the empty comments on my wordpress site?
Thanks very much for your support – I am freaking out a bit
Send me an email through http://peterpollock.com with a login to your WP and I’ll take a look…
I’m wondering if the data is really there it’s just the theme isn’t showing it!
Peter
Thank you SO MUCH for doing this! Am sending email now.
peter’s a champ.
Done!
I’ve sent all the info through – if you can’t see my mail please check your spam box
Hi again Peter did you get my mail? I still did not get anything from you? Thanks!!!
Hi Peter,
I got your email – thanks for your reply, it’s interesting to hear that it does the same mistake on test sites as well… Thank you for checking and testing it like that! It’s very strange indeed, I will tell my client about that and try to notify Blogger…
About the header I am a bit gutted as this is the kind of quick modification that you usually would get from the makers when you spend some money buying a Premium theme. Thanks for the advice anyway, I cannot spend any more money on this but will wait for the makers of the theme to manifest themselves – they have been completely unreachable so far.
Again thank you so much for your help and consideration I really appreciate you doing that!
flora,
love how pete’s helping you here!
Yeah he’s been great, I ended up copy the comments manually and now the site is up and looking cool… I also used some of your advice on adding advertisement.
Great Blog!!!
wow!
Yes you can thanks very much!! The new work-in-progress site is at http://lovingdalston.co.uk/wordpress/ and the old one is at http://lovingdalston.blogspot.com/
Do you need some wp admin login info to check this from the inside?
OK… I’m missing something and I know it’s something stupid.
My client’s blogger address was, let’s say, http://www.oldsite.com
They are moving and are using the address http://www.newsite.com
The redirect kind of works, but whatever address at oldsite.com you type in, it redirects to one particular post at newsite.com.
So let’s say I try to visit the post oldsite.com/10/07/qwerty.html
It will redirect to newsite.com/abacus
If I try to visit the post oldsite.com/09/08/johnboy.html
it STILL goes to newsite.com/abacus
Do I need to release the oldsite.com address from blogger so it reverts to the blogspot.com address? If so, what happens to all the links that come up in google searches pointing to oldsite.com?
yes, i think you’ll have to release the domain so it can do blogspot.
Hello there,
I’ve found a piece of advice how to redirect traffic from “Google friends connect” into WordPress. I’ve haven’t tried it yet but I hope someone will find it helpful:
http://bloggertowp.org/migrate-google-friends-connect-from-blogger-to-wordpress-blog/
I’ll let you know when I redirect it with success.
I have a silly question: when should I write “redirect posts” on my old blog? Before redirecting, right? I won’t be able to edit blogger anymore after redirecting if I’m correct..
Hello,
I’ve found a piece of advice how to redirect traffic from “Google friends connect” into WordPress. I’ve haven’t tried it yet but I hope someone will find it helpful:
http://bloggertowp.org/migrate-google-friends-connect-from-blogger-to-wordpress-blog/
I’ll let you know when I redirect it with success.
I have a silly question: when should I write “redirect posts” on my old blog? Before redirecting, right? I won’t be able to edit blogger anymore after redirecting if I’m correct..
This SEEMED to work for me, with regard to migrating my Google friend connect folks.
http://www.myfrontporchswing.com/taking-your-followers-from-blogger-to-wordpress
And it looks like it’s the same information as in the other link, so…I will still post this comment. For posterity.
Hi John,
Thanks. Very simple took minutes – and i was really worried about doing it!
HOWEVER – none of the text from each actual post has migrated…
The title, tags, comments have all successfully migrated but not the actual blog content inc. pictures.
Also out of 33 posts identified it only transfered 20, the older ones didn’t shift.
Many thanks in advance
Tom
sometimes you have to do it more than once… did you migrate before the changes on blogspot?
John, just one more question. Wil my blogger RSS also will migrate or should I redirect it another way? Thanks!
depends if you’re using feedburner. if not, you really can’t migrate.
I use Feed Burner now (I use almost everything Tent Blogger recommend to use, you’re my WP guru, you know?) but I didn’t used it in blogger.
I found an article which recommends to change htaccess but is it safe?
Here is this tutorial: http://bloggertowp.org/migrate-from-blogger-to-wordpress-best-tutorial/ (Moving feed subscribers part)
you can try this. the easiest way is to just change the source feed. done!
ps. I know that I should uptade RSS but it seems that blogger have more than one RSS adress (it has “atom rss” and different rss for comments..). Which one should I choose? Thanks and sorry for taking your time!
do you know which one most people subscribed to?
It’s PageRank 3 and between 1100-1500 visits monthly (the blog has 6 months and 50 posts) significant enough to migrate it to wordpress or it will be better to start anew (maybe migrating the posts which are useful but without fully redirecting) ? More than half of the visits come from my friends’s blogs on the same niche (a rather small one!)so I don’t know if my posts Google rank are worth the hassle.
depends on wha tyou want to do with the blog long-term. might not be enough reason to move?
Hi John,
In fact, there is no BIG reason to move, other that I’m a bit fed up of blogger’s failures and that I don’t like at all the way the new templates work. I want to have a magazine theme and I’m working on one but I find much easier making templates for WordPress (I have it installed locally). Maybe I should keep this in Blogger…and begin a new one in WordPress , I have some ideas on my mind
I’m a mature Multimedia student at University so anyway, I have to learn something about WordPress and MySQL databases sooner or later 
Thanks a lot, I’ve enjoyed reading many of your posts !
Patricia it depends what you want to achieve. But sometimes you just don’t know how the future will look like…In my opinion the sooner you move the better. I can tell you my own experience: I’ve got a small, small food blog. Nothing fancy. But as the time passed my posts became better and better I’ve even was invited for some blogger meetings etc. Now I decided to move to WordPress. And it IS a pain. I have to move feeds ,subscribers, pictures a lot of things to do. Decision is up to you but if I know what I know now I’d start my blog on WordPress at the begining.
I think you nailed it , it’s easier to make changes while it is small. In fact, I probably won’t be thinking about it if it was bigger…I’m way too lazy !
Thank you !
PD : By the way, your food photos made me hungry, everything looks yummy !!!
))
i agree with this!
John I DID it! I’ve made redirection and it worked, thanks!
You have got my special thanks in this post:
http://ziolowyzakatek.com.pl/2011/08/1738/
(even in English especially for you;)) and your blog is in my recommended links. I’m almost done with migration (only this Google Followers matter to do) and almost did every step in your Blogger to WordPress tutorial.
Thanks!
wow… this couldn’t make me more happy!
What a great site you have! Thanks for sharing so much information. It’s great for people like me who have no idea about websites and basically anything technical!
I’ve spent a lot of the past weekend feeling very frustrated because my migration didn’t go according to plan! To cut a long story short, I have now got all my posts imported after multiple tries, multiple ways.
I followed your instructions to get the redirect happening, and it works when people go to visit just the main Blogspot address, but any post links get an error. Also any post links within my new website get an error.
Are you able to tell me what I’m doing wrong?
There’s such a steep learning curve with WordPress and SEO etc!!
ah. april, it’s hard to diagnose what you’ve done and where to go. can you start from the beginning?
Hi again, I was hoping someone would have commented by now.
I think it might have something to do with my blogger.php file? I played around with changing “blogger.php” to “Blogger.php” as someone mentioned in the comments about the capital letters and the created “blogger” page reverted to the default template rather than the “Blogger” template.
When I clicked on a blogspot.com link, it redirected to the blank blogger page. When I changed the template back to “Blogger” I am getting the same error “HTTP 403 Forbidden” – The website declined to show this webpage.
Can someone help me please??!!
Hi April,
Email me through the contact form on peterpollock.com and I’ll help you out, if I can.
thanks peter!
Ok to start from the beginning…
I had trouble from the start directly importing from Blogger to WordPress.org as I kept getting an error. I then tried to import from Blogger to a free WordPress.com blog, but while all headers came across, I had no content.
As a last resort, I exported the XML file from Blogger, used the conversion app to change it to a WordPress WXR file and imported it through WordPress on my WordPress.org blog.
I followed your instructions above to create the “blogger” page and the “blogger.php” file. I also changed the permalink settings of WordPress to match Blogger, but I noticed that Blogger shortens post names while WordPress doesn’t.
All seems to be working fine with my old plain blogspot address ie. http://myfoodtrail.blogspot.com. If you click on that, it will redirect you to my new site, http://myfoodtrail.com.
However, if you try to click on a single post link eg. http://myfoodtrail.blogspot.com/2011/04/dining-out-point-albert-park.html (or you can Google “My Food Trail Dining Out” for other examples), it comes up with a HTTP 403 Forbidden error saying that the website declined to show the page.
The address ends up being http://myfoodtrail.com/blogger/?q=http://myfoodtrail.blogspot.com/2011/04/dining-out-point-albert-park.html. Something is obviously not working properly.
The link on my current site is http://myfoodtrail.com/2011/04/dining-out-point-albert-park.html.
I don’t understand why the main webpage is redirecting properly, but the single post links do not.
As I mentioned above, when I change the “blogger” page to the default template (instead of using the “Blogger” template), the single post redirect bring you to the “blogger” page on my current site, but the address still remains as http://myfoodtrail.com/blogger/?q=http://myfoodtrail.blogspot.com/2011/04/dining-out-point-albert-park.html.
Peter is not able to help me without me giving him admin access to my site.
Is there someone else that can help me please?
Ah, after all that, I finally realised the solution was a simple one after Googling some more about the error.
I had to contact my webhost and get them to whitelist some security rules and now all is fine with my redirects!! Woohoo!!
Sorry to have taken up so much of your comment space!
you are awesome! congrats on the move!
This has to be my new favorite site.
But I have a question – this is all about Blogger to WP.org, but have you posted about moving a WP.com site over to a self hosted WP.org one? I’m assuming the basic idea of editing some html to point the old site to the new one is the main thing, but if you’ve already written the code for that, I’d sure love to see it! Thanks!
yes. i have. use the search box in the sidebar to find older articles in the future: http://tentblogger.com/migrate-wordpress-com-org/
Trepidation abounds, but I’m seriously getting closer and closer to doing this for one of my Blogger blogs. Took the first step by changing my URL from blogspot to a custom domain name. Am curious to see how this will affect PageRank and analytics. A million thanks for this brilliant walkthough, John. I look forward to dipping more than just my toes in the water!
Jay,
If you’d like, I can give you a free test site for a couple of weeks where you can test the transfer process and play with designing a site on WordPress.
that would be so nice!
go for it!
Hi Peter, Thanks for the offer. I already work with wordpress for my a couple of my blogs, but I cetainly would love to test the transfer securely and maybe take things further. So, thanks I really appreciate the offer! And thanks, John for the encouragement
Hope to hear from you soon!
did he get back to you?
is it a smart idea to tell Blogger to stop letting the search engines index your site, i.e. to change the ‘Let search engines find your blog’ option to ‘No’?
no, i’d keep it.
Great tutorial! Thanks so much!
However, I only achieved a 95% success. I copied everything over no problem and even managed to land it on the page I wanted. That, by the way, took a little extra figuring out. I didn’t want my transfer to end up on my opening page but wanted it on URL/blog. I had to do some additional research on creating a static opening page and a separate blog page. Just FYI, you may want to include that in your procedure.
However, that is not why I’m only at a 95% solution. My redirect from my blogspot site (christophersapologies.blogspot.com) goes right to my new site. But links to individual posts also go to the latest post; it is not a direct correlation.
I moved over 400 posts to WP so I don’t want my readers to have to hunt and peck for an old post. I’m sure the fault is mine; could you help me? I cut and pasted my blogspot template html for you to look at; I’m assuming the problem is in that.
Thanks again for a great tutorial and I hope we can get this last piece worked for a 100% solution. BTW…here is a link to a post from a week ago to test so you can see what I’m talking about
http://christophersapologies.blogspot.com/2011/08/results-of-so-called-biblical.html
Christopher
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="”>
window.location.href=’http://www.christophersmith-op.com/blog/’
window.location.href=’http://www.christophersmith-op.com/blog/?q=’
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.christophersmith-op.com/blog/?q=” />
This page has moved to a new address.
<a href="http://www.christophersmith-op.com/blog/blogger/?q=“>
Looks like my HTML was cut off. Trying again…
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="”>
window.location.href=’http://www.christophersmith-op.com/blog/’
window.location.href=’http://www.christophersmith-op.com/blog/?q=’
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.christophersmith-op.com/blog/?q=” />
This page has moved to a new address.
<a href="http://www.christophersmith-op.com/blog/blogger/?q=“>
hmm.
Christopher, I’ll preface this with: I really am not sure I know what I’m talking about.
But.
The first time I did this, I had it in my head that my homepage was one kind of page, and then I needed to make a “blog” in my WordPress site – so I created a page with the blog template – I am assuming you did something similar. So, like you (I think), instead of pasting my domain name (scrutinies.net), I pasted scrutinies.net/blog all of the places in that code that replaced the HTML for the Blogger template. Hope you are following that.
You don’t need to do that, though. See how your permalinks for your individual post don’t say christophersmith-op.com/blog/whatevertherestofthepostis? All the “blog” page does is create a page that displays your most recent posts and it looks all bloggy, in contrast to how the homepage looks in many WP templates. But it doesn’t fundamentally change the fact that WordPress creates posts and you have a site full of posts.
I will let John explain all the ways in which I am probably wrong. But I’d try that – do the code just the way he said, without the /blog added on.
Good luck!
ah, thanks for all your help dorian! you’re such a champ!
Hey, John – thanks again for this tutorial. It’s permanetly bookmarked in my brain.
I wanted to let you know that I found this resource for dealing with the .html permalink issue when one has been publishing on a custom domain (on Blogger). Between the steps she recommends, and this tutorial, my most recent blogger-to-wordpress migration SEEMS to have worked…I think.
http://themummble.com/moving-from-blogger-to-wordpress/
dorian,
thakns for this!
You’re welcome.
Now, you have spent enough time talking to me and these other fine commenters about this topic, so I will try to be very general in what I’m asking.
I, like a fool, tried the whole Blogger-to-WordPress migration for the first time with my own site – my firstborn, jewel of my heart site. And totally screwed it up somehow. I’ve been hacking away at it to TRY to fix the redirects/permalinks/whatever and I think I just keep making the problem worse. Now I get a 403 error when I try to go to an old post:
You are not authorized to access the webpage at http://scrutinies.net/blogger/?q=http://scrutinies.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-which-i-revise-my-entire-life-in-500.html. You may need to sign in.
I think my fundamental question is – is there any way to wipe the slate clean of all the things I tried and start over? I know the answer is going to be…no.
In contrast, the other blogger-to-WP migrations I’ve done have worked. So I guess I learned something along the way.
My most recent effort was switching back to the ugly .html blogger permalink structure. No dice.
So I guess I’ll just try to focus on generating great content in the future and leave the old posts and permalinks…in the past.
cool! everything ok?
Well, because I know about the Broken Link Checker plugin (thanks to Tentblogger), I am gradually finding out about broken links. My one question is if there’s any “reset button” to set things back to normal now that I’ve completely messed up the permalink situation. If not – no problem, focus on the future, etc. And I’m thinking there’s no point in my keeping the .html permalink structure if the links are all going to generate a 403 error anyway.
ah. good call.
Wow,good jobs friends.I like it
Hi guys,
I have gone over this post and comments with a fine toothed comb. I am going to switch to WP but honestly all of this is giving me a mental meltdown. My blog has 40,000 visitors a month and 95% of that is from search engine traffic. As such, I can’t screw this up. I am seriously considering hiring someone to do it if the price was right. That being said, I have a couple of questions. The reason you add the php file to your WP template is for a second redirect right? All of your redirects from blogger go to that page which then sorts them out? I am not understanding why you have to do this step if you make your WP addresses the exact same as blogger addresses. Secondly, as you can tell, I have my own domain name however even though I have WP installed on my domain name I can’t get to it until blogger is no longer hosting my domain name. Does that mean I need to switch to a blogspot url until I get my new WP template and import work done? Finally can you tell me how to change my domain name from being hosted by blogger to Godaddy? It was purchased through blogger using Godaddy but it is handled in google apps. How would you handle it so that I do not go down.
Blessings
Pastor Duke
i’d honestly hire someone…! take the pressure off!
I desperately need some help.
I followed the tutorial and it worked great. My only problem is redirecting my old RSS. I already redirected my blogspot RSS but I have another .com address that I bought through gblogger where the RSS feed isn’t updating. I have 1,700 people subscribed so I don’t want them to have to update manually. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! I can’t find the answer anywhere.
solved by changing the original feed option directly in feedburner.
sweet!
Hi John-
How about moving from WP to WP (both .org) because of a new domain?
I started my blog a while back before I had any recorded music, and now I have a new domain that’s easier for folks to remember…both on WordPress. Some of my posts have been imported to the new site, with the rest to be done soon. My new site will have a blog section, which will replace the old one. That domain expires this month, and I’m not renewing it since I have the new one.
Anything special I need to do to not lose SEO? I’ll be updating the rss feeds, but I wanted to make sure I was doing everything and not missing something.
josh,
i have a post about that… these two should help:
http://tentblogger.com/combine-blogs/
http://tentblogger.com/install-wordpress-locally/
Apparently I didn’t dig well enough here. Thanks, John!
all good!
Hi John,
Just thought I would follow up. I ended up doing it myself this week. I just used the plug in that you can get for wp to blogger redirects. I had a few glitches but none that did any serious damage. It took a little bit to figure out how to change my feed for feedburner, I had to fix some pictures, and fix some broken links to my pages since they didn’t redirect, but my pages were not things that were competitive for search. All in all I am a happy camper. Googlebot has been all over my site like fruit flies on strawberries. Thanks for all the information and insight on this page. It was the easiest of all the pages to follow as far as directions as to what to do. The transfer of hosting was actually easy. Just replaced the blogger hosting nameservers to my new hosting nameservers. The transition took about 24 hours. The only frustration was that other people could view my own site before I could! LOL
ahhhhhhh! congrats though!
Ok, my head is spinning a bit from reading all these comments (and the struggles). So forgive me if my questions have already been answered.
I already own a domain name to use on blogger but will be transferring it to wp. Right now I am actually still at .Blogspot.com but it is bring redirected to the .com by GoDaddy. Do I need to contact GoDaddy and request that the Domaine .com not redirect to the blogger page, but instead tie to wp page?
Also, I have been working on the wp site in preview dns mode. If I make some of these changes (like adding the blogger.php and blogger page) while on preview dns, will it still be there when I “go live”. And what is the progression to take it off preview dns?
About rss FeedBurner. Do I have to create a new account for the wp page or just redirect it vue the FeedBurner edit page?
I don’t have the funds to hire someone and am so nervous to mess things up!
the domain needs to stand by itself, yes.
Nice tutorial, John.
I have bookmarked this page for the time I need to make the big move from Blogger to WordPress. If all goes to plan I will drop a line to let you know all about it.
awesome! let me know!
This tutorial is awesome. I am planning on buying a custom domain today, getting a host and moving from blogger to wordpress.
The problem is I am worried that if I do something wrong I could mess everything up.
Would you be able to give me help if something did go wrong?
One last thing, setting up a custom domain also seems to require a lot of fiddling about with settings, have you got a tutorial for this?
Sorry for the long comment, but I am absolutely rubbish when it comes to all this.
Thanks
Rob Thomas
feel free to ask questions….!
Hi John!
I need some advice. My question is somewhat similar to Jose Erre’s (above)but slightly different. I’ll try to keep it short and simple. I’m a newbie that is very COMFORTABLE with Blogger’s user friendliness & simplicity. I just bought a custom domain name at 1&1, and I followed Blogger’s instructions on using that domain name in Blogger. I haven’t posted a single thing in my new blog yet. I plan on migrating from blogger to WordPress in the future, but I really want to get “comfortable” with WordPress’s platform while I “continue to post” in Blogger. Once I learn my way around WordPress, enough to want to pay $10/month for getting it hosted, I’ll make the switch from Blogger to WordPress (I’m a little intimidated but I know I NEED to do it).
You told Jose Erre that he should “release” his domain name (from pointing or re-directing) to Blogger first, BEFORE completing step 1. My question is this. Won’t releasing the domain name affect SEO? Or will it not? I want to use the exact same 1&1 purchased domain name I’m using for Blogger when I make the switch to WordPress. I know you’re probably thinking, … since I haven’t made a single post in Blogger yet with this new blog, why don’t I just set it up in WordPress to begin with? LOL.
Well, the problem is this. Blogger is VERY SIMPLE for me. I can just come up with my idea’s and post, post, post with absolutely NO learning curve. WordPress seems a little intimidating to me (I’m a newbie), and I’m afraid learning my way around it’s platform might hinder the frequency of my posting. Plus I’m already learning SEO right now, and that takes away from some of my Blogging time enough already. So what is the best way to ensure a SMOOTH SEO transition in the “future” when I’m ready to make the switch? Will releasing my custom domain name from blogger long enough to implement your steps, and then re-directing or pointing the domain name to my new WordPress blog affect SEO? I plan on making this switch in about 6 months from now? Suppose I luck up and get a lot of traffic and a little page rank by then? What do you advise?
THANKS! I’d appreciate ANY advice. And by the way. This is the absolute BEST advice on this topic I found online.I’m going to RSS in BlogLine. GOOD JOB!
the first thing you should do is learn wordpress… before you do anything else.
go sign up for a free account at wordpress.com … and get your sea legs…!
Ok thanks John
First problem, I purchased a custom domain yestarday, and it all works good, but when I type in mysite.com or http://mysite.com, it redirects to the site I got the domain name from.
I followed all of the instuctions from blogger perfectly, I think? Do you think I should just wait a couple of days to see if it works? Or should it be working by now?
Hope you understand that lol
Rob Thomas
you have to install wordpress on that domain. have you done that?
I followed your instructions for migrating blogger to wordpress. Typing in the url of my old blog redirects to the wordpress one – no problem. All links external to the blog work fine; however, if I try to go to a specific page in my old blog or have a direct link to another earlier blog (e.g. http://statelineatheists.blogspot.com/2009/02/pascal.html), I will get the following:
403 Forbidden
Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /blogger on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache mod_fcgid/2.3.6 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_bwlimited/1.4 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 Server at thehappymillstone.com Port 80
I see other people had this problem, but I don’t see a solution. Any suggestions? (I did try to change the permalinks to: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html but that didn’t work.
Do you keep the published ‘Blogger’ page public or private?
public i believe.
Thanks for this post, it is very helpful. I have a question I haven’t seen addressed here. I see that you have said that it is ok to set the page to “private” so that it doesn’t show up in page menus, but for some reason the page redirects stop working for me in Firefox and Safari when I set the page to private. If I set it to public, the page redirects work great. The redirects work in Chrome either way.
I have cleared my browser cookies/cache, etc., but that hasn’t worked.
Any ideas for how to get around this or why this might be happening?
hmm. when i mean “private” i mean not explicitly available via a menu item.
Ok, I am having a similar problem that others have had but I cannot seem to fix it. When trying to access an individual post I am re-directed to the homepage.
I followed the instructions to a T and have read through all the comments and cannot seem to figure out the problem.
what is your blog?
I can’t import my full blog from blogger to wordpress, only 22 out of total 49 posts and 885 out of total 1374 comments are imported, after that “The magic button” changes to “set authors” and the import stops. I have tried many times. Don’t know what is the problem? My blogspot blog is http://www.improvementexam.com and I am shifting it to http://www.beta.improvementexam.com/wp for testing first. Is there a problem with my web host? my new wordpress blog is hosted on 000webhost.com . Please help it’s very very important for me to shift my whole blog to wordpress.
A seo software detected this page [http://www.example.com/blog/blogger/] an issue. The page doesn’t contain title tag. Just wondering what will happen if I block this page from being crawled by search engine robots. Is it advisable to do that?
Thanks. Hope to hear from you soon.
After uploading the blogger.php file and upon creating the new page in WP, the “Blogger” template is not an option in my Template pulldown. All I have available is “Default Template” or “One column-no sidebar”.
Thoughts?
John, disregard my previous message. I worked out the issue and had placed the file one directory higher than it should have been. This redirect is AWESOME! Many thanks.
http://www.garygarbett.com/passingglimpse/
John, Thanks again for this great tutorial. I’ve given you a nod on todays post and a link to this great tool. Peace.
http://www.garygarbett.com/passingglimpse/2011/10/28/a-halloween-transformation/
coyotehuntingresource.blogspot.com
I switched it back to blogger because I didn’t want to lose any google SEO.
I am stuck on uploading the Blogger SEO php file to the theme folder directly. Help! How do I add it to the folder? I can’t figure out where to upload it.
Hi, Tentblogger. Thanks for a FABULOUS site. I just found it when searching for an answer to transferring from Blogger to WordPress, but I’ve been checking out your other articles, and I’ll be back… and be a regular!
I wonder if I could ask a favor. I posted a comment on this article on Friday and I haven’t seen it posted. If you have it and it won’t be posted, would you mind emailing it to me? My apologies, I should have kept a copy of it. I’m in the middle of moving a second site of mine, and I got stuck half way, and now I don’t remember exactly what my problem was. : ) I turned the Blogger blog to private on that site in the mean time to hope to prevent Google SEO problems. I am using that transfer as a “practice run” for moving christianprayersdaily.com to WordPress, which I really don’t want to have down or to lose SEO, so having the notes I posted to you will be most helpful in trying to track down an answer to the problem.
Thanks again for a FANTASTIC site!
Yea!!!! This has to be magic! I have this working on my “easy” test site… Next step is the tough site I was practicing for! THANK YOU!
And Janet, I was stuck at the same point. I went into my cpanel with my hosting company and went to the file manager. I found the theme folder there inside the public_html folder and was able to upload the file with the file manager. It was all downhill from there. : )
I spoke too soon… The redirect sends people to the new site, and I was pulling up the homepage OK, but individual URLs are giving this report:
Home
No Results Found
The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.
I wasn’t able to use the WordPress importer to connect to Blogger, so I used the method of importing posts through WordPress.com and then uploading the posts. Could that be the reason for the broken links? At first I set up my WordPress site to handle permalinks differently than Blogger does (post only.) At that point I was receiving the error message above for the redirection of internal links. So in case the way I had WordPress’ permalinks set up made a difference, I switched WordPress to handle permalinks in the same format as Blogger to limits problems, and am still getting this error message. I waited overnight in case allowing time to pass would help, and I’m still showing errors. (Maybe waiting another day or two would help?) Any input on how to resolve this problem would be most appreciated.
Hello John, thanks for the article.
When I attempt to run the importer from WP, I get a Google page with this error …….
The site “http://flightweek.net” has not been registered.
Any advice is request and welcome.
TIA
Hi John,
I did exactly what you’ve written above and the redirect works well all this while. But today, I’ve discovered that the redirect isn’t working. Normally a post like:
http://petergan.blogspot.com/2011/09/has-your-brand-overdelivered-before.html
will redirect to:
http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/has-your-brand-od-ed-before/
But now, it redirects to http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/blogger/
Help!!!! What’s happening?
2 possibilities:
1) When I first launch my new website, the permalink used to be:
http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/09/21/has-your-brand-od-ed-before/
Then I changed the permalink by taking out the date and month. Does this affect the redirect?
2) I did a change yesterday on yoast wordpress plugin. I exclude the page http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/blogger from the sitemap.
Ahh.. Please help, John. Or anyone there?
I figured it out. Just sharing it to you guys if you experience the same problem.
Apparently, it was Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin that is screwing up my redirect.
I unchecked the option below located at the Permalinks section:
- Redirect ugly URL’s to clean permalinks. (Not recommended in many cases!)
And poof! Everything went back to normal !
I still cannot figure out why individual post urls re-direct to the homepage. Does anyone know a fix for this?
For Example:
coyotehuntingresource.blogspot.com/2010/03/10-essentials-for-calling-coyote.html
always re-directs to: coyotehuntingresource.com
instead of: coyotehuntingresource.com/2010/03/10-essentials-for-calling-coyote/
These links will not work as I have turned off the blogspot redirect to wordpress in order to keep any google seo
have you fixed your wordpress settings?
I thought I did. Which settings are you referring to?
permalinks?
Yes I have used the default setting, month and name setting, and this custome setting:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/
with no luck
you need to add .html
Greetings to all.
I posted this comment for the TentBlogger’s attention a few days back and did not get any response. My plans of migrating to WP remain on hold. Can anyone kindly help out.
—-
When I attempt to run the importer from WP, I get a Google page with this error …….
The site “http://flightweek.net” has not been registered.
Any advice is requested and welcome.
TIA
—-
Thanks once again in advance.
… interesting? explain your steps…?
Hi John. Step by step as per your document. The “not registered” error comes at the authorisation step as in your pic http://cdn.tentblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/google-wordpress-migration-grant-access-570×375.png
Strangely enough, I tried this at WP.com http://flightweek.wordpress.com and the import has worked.
I have the WP.org hosted at GoDaddy. In WP dashboard>>General Settings, I have set the WP address URL and Site URL to http://www.flightweek.net, but you notice during the import attempt, it is only http://flightweek.net.
TIA
what you can do then is take the import from wp.com and export it!
Hi, I recently moved from http://www.analystcalls.blogspot.com to http://www.analystcalls.in (wordpress)
I believe Ive followed all the steps before I came across this post.
Its been 1month that I moved to wordpress. But lost entire search engine traffic. till date not even one search engine url.
I have checked all urls..they are redirecting properly. webmaster tools is ok. google analytics code is also added. rss changed. im using 301 redirect plugin. It is workiing fine.
Everything seems perfect but 0 traffic from search engine.
how can I fix this?
hm. have you looked in google webmasters?
ya after migrating to wp..it is taking nearly 10 days for my article to get indexed. so what i did is..i submitted the article url to googlebot in webmasters and in no time it got indexed.
I got doubt why other articles or pages not getting indexed. then after few hours i submitted few more urls..all got failed status.
then i resubmitted the url which got success status in the mornging..that also giving failed status.
so are you ok now?
Still no luck! This is beginning to get frustrating.
I added .html to permalinks so it now looks like this:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
is this correct?
Edit to the post above:
Not frustrating because of you John, I definitely appreciate your help!
Just frustrating because I cant get it to work! (and because I bought a new domain for this and so far I am unable to use it)
hmm. something’s not right then. screenshot of the page?
Thanks to you sir. It’s great things to me and useful.
sure thing suren!
My main site is redirecting fine, but none of my individual posts are redirecting correctly. my old blogger site is http://detroitsghetto.blogspot.com and I am trying to redirect everything to wordpress, at http://www.detroitghetto.com. When I click on an old post, the url looks like this in my browser: http://detroitghetto.com/blogger/?q=http://detroitsghetto.blogspot.com/2009/10/detroit-dying-city.html
Any idea what the problem is? And great write up, I wouldn’t have even got this far otherwise!
hmm. did you get the code right?
Yes, the code was correct, but it ended up being a problem with hostgator security rules needing to be whitelisted. I found this info here: http://bloggertowp.org/solved-blogger-to-wordpress-redirection-issue-with-hostgator%E2%80%99s-hosting/
Hostgator tech new exactly what to do aand fixed the problem within an hour or so. Now all my posts are being redirected to it’s proper new location flawlessly.
sweet! appreciate this link!
John – best post I’ve found so far on this topic. Thank you so much for all the time you’ve spent fielding questions, too. I truly appreciate the screen captures, as I am not at all an able programmer.
This is probably an absolute no brainer question, but I got stuck on step 3. I can’t find the blasted directory to add the file. Maybe it’s just late and I’m overtired and missing something obvious…
I’m using Twenty Eleven, and I went into appearance >>editor and can see the style.css file and have the other files displaying on the sidebar, but I can’t find a directory page to edit. Point me in a direction?
John – A friend headed my call for help and I have managed to stumble through the rest of the tutorial. If you’re so inclined, you may wish to update this post or do a new post using the new blogger interface.
Thanks!
Laurie
ah, good point! i’ll have to take a look.
Thanks for this tutorial, I am planning to make the switch this week. Will probably be returning for help!
I followed this tutorial. Now I’ve lost my blogger site and my WP site isn’t even working. I lost all of my pages from my blogger site that contained information that I failed to back up. Is there anyway to back track? So frustrating..
Great idea, If I could get it to work!
I have 3 blogger blogs with custom domains…
I am an engineer- and take everything literally (>publishing- blog address) from the blog.customdomain.com?
2) all 3 of my sites act the same way:
When blog.blogspot.com – link is clicked on the web (from individual posts)resolve to the main page of the domain -every link on the web.
IF I change them back to the blog.customdomain.com address I get a loop 503 then a time out.
3) 6 places to change out google.com to what site exactly? I used the blog.customdomain.com (and for the top level domain –>customdomain.com (w\o www.) – Where do you change out Yoursite.com to Yoursite.com?
4)I changed permalinks after importing to wordpress to the /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html…is that correct? It seemed to have no effect on anything…
I left one blog as default (permalinks) and it acts the same as the other 2 (subdomain blog)
I forwarded my dns A records to / and to bog1.customdomain.com and blog2.customdomain.com…
I am in progres of setting up a multisite and hope to bridge amy phpbb3 board to these blogs (and add 2 ecommerce sites) and really need to keep my link juice with this- any help would really b appreciated…
for some reason this part was omitted from my post:
I am an engineer- and take everything literally (>publishing- blog address) from the blog.customdomain.com?
I am an engineer- and take everything literally (>publishing- blog address) from the blog.customdomain.com?
I am lost in regard to custom domains, their impact and settings.
1 was listed as the domain and the other 2 were subdomains…
I have read this post and all of the comments a few times and still cannot understand the following items:
1) Once you paste the forwarding code into your reverted classic blogger html, do you then change the blogspot address back to the blog.blogspot.com (Settings>>publishing- blog address) from the blog.customdomain.com?
Ok, I have my main(blogger – now mainsite.blogger.com) site forwarding to the websitename.com/).
WHen I click on a link on the web such as:
mainsite/2011/06/bears-people.html it renders my blank New hosted WP main page as blank but has the address:
mainsite/2011/06/bears-people.html
SO I know I am so close I can smell it. Can you (John or Peter) hand me some guidance?
Not sure where you are referring to change the permalink?
(Quoted from the post above)
[quote]“try doing a pretty permalink /blogger and that should be fine.
REPLY
Melissa
June 15, 2011 at 5:24 PM #
John, can you explain what you mean by pretty permalink /blogger? I’m having the exact same issue and I’ve tried a few things in the blogger template and in the wordpress permalinks but nothing works.”[/quote]
If I can get this site working, I am sure I can get the 2 subdomains.
Thank you in advance!
http://forhuntersbyhunters.com/2011/10/hunting-technology-it-isnt-bad-thing.html
This post resolves to my New WordPress Hosted site A. I can find it on the web as an old post with the exact same adderss (google search)
When I click on it, I go to WP SITE A but to a blank page- with the caption “The page you requested could not be found.”
Am I close here?
check permalink settings and add .html
http://tentblogger.com/permalinks/
I am importing an existing Blogger site with a custom domain to an existing WordPress site.
I am confused how you maintain the permalinks since both are different.
Also, when I import, it creates a whole bunch of new categories. Are these Blogger labels? I need all the post to fall under one cateroy in WordPress that already exists.
Thanks.
Wow really nice post.. it helps a lot specially for those blogger user who wants to move to wordpress.. More Power to Admin..
sure thing!
So I have a question if I can’t do this myself, how much do people charge to switch you over from blogger to wordpress?
there are some people who charge just a bit for this type of help.
You Rock!!!
Works like a charm. To familiarize myself with wordpress, I had imported posts already and then later re-imported new posts, this created some double posts, which I deleted…hence, some of the redirection links didn’t work because they pointed to a link I had deleted. However, I had manually copied and saved all the blogger links so when manually testing them I used the “redirection” plugin for wordpress to manually redirect anything that wasn’t working. I copied the address that blogger redirected to (and that gave an error) into the “redirect” plugin “source url” and then went to my new site, found the article, copied that url and posted that into the “target url” and all is well! (just wanted to add that for anyone with similar issues). I also tried creating a new permalink for an existing post within wp and the blogger url automatically redirects to the new url automatically.
awesome! so glad you found some success with it!
Hi John,
Just came across your article. Is the tutorial going to be the same, given the new Blogger interface? I’m forced to use the older interface as they’ve changed their Browser requirements. Do you know anything about that issue with Blogger? Will I be okay if I stick with the older user interface? Or should I convert to WordPress? I’m nervous about losing 5 years of blogs in the process, which would kill me. Also, will my photos all transfer over to WordPress during conversion? My blog is photo heavy!
Thanks for the advice,
Gwen
perhaps you need to hire someone to give you more confidence.
Thank you so much… I have spent the morning trying to find the best advice and everything was missing something and I am so nervous because I have worked so hard to get the rank I now have. I tell everyone on my team to start with wordpress… going for cheap cost way to much… Love your site… You are a great role model for adding value into the market. I bookmark with a smile and a sigh of relief. Now I just need to do it :p
awesome! thanks dan! share with others!
great tutorial! I’ve been looking information because I’m having problems in transferring all the data in my old blog.
Thanks much for helping man..
great!
I currently have a Blogger Import and Blogger Redirect plugin installed, as well as another Redirection plugin — I am looking to decrease the number of plugins that I am running. I switched to self hosted WP over a year ago, and I imported two blogger blogs. Would I be able to add the php file (one for each blog, right), update my blogger codes and delete the first two Blogger plugins without loosing anything?
you should, yes. that is the intention. i hate plugins…! (too many, that is).
That was easier to do then I thought! Thanks
Does this work (at least the first part, not the redirecting, obviously) to import posts to a locally hosted WordPress? I’m building my site locally first and then going live when it’s ready. I’d like to import the content over so I can fiddle with the design there.
yes. you could.
Woohoo thanks! So far so good, the import took like all of two minutes and brought my pictures and everything. I can’t wait to tackle the real work when I go live! Thank you so much for this whole blog, by the way. I am so glad I landed here.
awesome!!!!!!!!
If I am using the free version of blogspot and the free version of wordpress, is it still possible to migrate my blogspot to my wordpress? I have been doing my blogspot for our adoption journey and need to move it so relatives don’t have to “sign up” to know what is going on. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
not via this tutorial.
Thank you for such a great post, I was able to migrate all of my blogger posts into wordpress. However, only about 1/2 of my comments came over : (
Can you please tell me how to hopefully retrieve the rest of my blogger comments over to my wordpress blog?
Thank you!
try the process again. sometimes it gets caught up.
Thank you ! that’s great !
It took me some times, because I had to come back to the “old” blogger interface because with the new I got an error when trying to implement the new code for the template. Maybe you could add this advice in your procedure.
i’ll have to take a look.
If someone get the error
”
Error parsing XML, line 2, column 73: The value of attribute “dir” associated with an element type “null” must not contain the ‘<' character\
"
you need to revert to the old blogger interface, and it will be ok.
thank you for that amazing tutorial. I’ve been looking for this information for some time and it’s really hard to find a descent one.
I have just one question. my blog at the blogspot have some follwers and I wonder if I can also move them to wordpress. It may be a silly question of course because I never used wordpress before but I’d really be glad if you may answer.
what do you mean followers?
I am moving a blooger site with around 4000 posts and 7000 comments to wordpress. There are many contributors on the blog the posts come over fine but I am having two ishues first the comments are comming over with who they are from and what post they go to but the comment text is not there. Has anyone els seen this and found a way to fix this?
Next since there are many contributors how do I get wp to set the post to the right contributor?
Thank you
should be able to migrate authorship. is that not showing up on a local test?
Thanks very much John,for this DIY tutorial,which is an excellent step by step guide.I had been hesitating to do the migration until I came across this post. My Q for you is this:I have embedded audio podcasts on my blogger blog, if I migrate to wordpress(I have a ready wordpress site on a domain name),will the audio podcasts also be imported?
Also, blogger importer 0.4 is compatible upto wordpress 3.2.1. whereas I have the wordpress 3.3.1 installed. So, I am wondering if it will work?
Kindly advise.
hm… how are they being loaded now?
I am hesitating to do the import until I am absolutely sure. John, I will be happy if you can tell me if anyone has tried importing audio podcasts too.Also,whether,blogger importer 0.4 plugin will work with wordpress 3.3.1.
Thanks!
why not try importing into a wordpress.com blog to see?
Thank for share tip, i use to wordpress theme, WordPress is best for SEO
If I import to a wordpress .com blog and when satisfied, is it possible to once again do the import on to a self hosted wordpress blog ?
yes, if it works on .com you can export from .com to .org!
Thanks so much for this tutorial — so thorough and clear!
My only question: I have successfully migrated my blog over to WordPress and everything seems to be running fine, EXCEPT for when I click on an old link (i.e. a link that comes up in a Google search, at my old Blogger blog) — it doesn’t take me to the corresponding post in WordPress, but to a blank page.
Is this fixable?
should be. is your redirect working at blogspot?
Yes, when I visit my old Blogger blog (feedyourselfonsixdollarsaday.blogspot.com), it redirects to my new blog (sixdollarsaday.com) successfully.
However, when I click on any old posts (i.e. http://feedyourselfonsixdollarsaday.blogspot.com/2012/02/taking-inventory.html), it redirects to a page on my new WordPress blog (http://sixdollarsaday.com/blogger/?q=http://feedyourselfonsixdollarsaday.blogspot.com/2012/02/taking-inventory.html) but displays a blank page that just says “Blogger” as the heading and has a comment box.
Okay, I looked into this a little more and realized that my initial problem was that I had uploaded the blogger.php file to the wrong place — my root directory rather than my theme directory.
However, now I have fixed that, correctly chosen “Blogger” as the Page Attributes template on the Blogger page, and am still having the following problems:
1) When I try to follow an old link (i.e. http://feedyourselfonsixdollarsaday.blogspot.com/2012/02/taking-inventory.html), I get a blank page with this error message:
“Access to the webpage was denied
You are not authorized to access the webpage at http://sixdollarsaday.com/blogger/?q=http://feedyourselfonsixdollarsaday.blogspot.com/2012/02/taking-inventory.html. You may need to sign in.
HTTP Error 403 (Forbidden): The server refused to fulfill the request.”
2) From the homepage of my new blog, there is a single tab above my content that says “Blogger.” If I click on it, I am taken to http://sixdollarsaday.com/blogger, which is a blank white page.
Any ideas on how to fix this? I’d really like the old site redirects to work!
Thanks.
did you add .html to your permalinks in wordpress?
Hmm, not sure I know how to do that. I went to Settings–>Permalinks, selected Custom Structure, and put “/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%.html” in that field, tried again, and still got the same result (clicking on an old Blogger link takes me to a blank page within my blog, rather than the new WordPress version of that migrated post).
Is there something additional I need to do?
I’m thinking that the problem must lie somewhere in the Blogger page I created, even though I followed your steps exactly and have gone over them multiple times.
This also seems odd to me: when I click on an old link, this is what appears in the URL bar: http://sixdollarsaday.com/blogger?q=http://feedyourselfonsixdollarsaday.blogspot.com/2012/02/taking-inventory.html (and an error message in the body of the page).
I don’t know a ton about PHP, but given the code you had us paste in the old Blogger template HTML, shouldn’t I expect there to be a “/” after the “blogger” part of the URL above, so that it looks like “sixdollarsaday.com/blogger/?q=…”
?
Would that help it redirect to the correct post at all? Sorry for all the replies to this…it’s just driving me nuts that I can’t figure it out!
did you do the HTML tab view?
What do you mean by that — in WordPress? Where would I find this option? You also mentioned adding “.html” to my permalinks in WordPress; can you tell me if I did that correctly given my response above, or if there’s something additional I need to do?
I currently have re-pasted the original HTML code back into Blogger so that it will still be somewhat functional until I figure this out, but I can revert back to the new HTML if that would be helpful, to try clicking on the old links and seeing what I mean.
there’s an HTML tab in your post options when you paste in the code.
in terms of permalinks:
http://tentblogger.com/permalinks/
i was having a problem while importing my blogspot into wordpress, i have my blogspot with a custom domain, while my wordpress has new domain name, it appears like this on my browser when i open a post on my blogspot old custom domain: http://www.newdomain.com/?blogger=http://www.blogspotcustomolddomain.com/2012/01/krusada-january-5-2012-abs-cbn.html
hmm. not sure about custom domains.
Hi John. I got stuck on this paragraph:
“Next, you’ll want to create a new Page in WordPress called blogger and choose the Template called Blogger in the “Page Attributes” area:”
I did every step you mentioned before, but I can’t get the blogger template to display
on the right sidebar of your page screen?
John: Yes! Here specifically
http://cdn.tentblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/page-attributes-blogger-template-wordpress.jpeg
On my wordpress it doesn’t show.
did you create the new template and put it into your theme?
I managed to resolve John! Any other issue, I’ll let you know. Thanks for the replies
John, how u doing? Just a doubt: I did the whole tutorial and it worked, Thanks! But as for the page I assigned the Blogger template, can I change the visibility of that page to Private or it needs to be Public?
you don’t need it to be directly accessible. you can do that.
Hi John,
Installed this and it worked great. Thanks for sharing. However, now, suddenly, it’s not picking up the $_GET value….maybe has something to do with upgrading to WP 3.3? Do you have any idea why this would be happening? I tried get_query_var() and that doesn’t work either……thanks.
fascinating. i’ll have to take a look.
Hi John,
I am so excited to tell you that I finally took courage and moved to wp! And guess what, my videos, podcasts also moved. Perfect! Now, I need to spruce up the look of my blog a bit. Thanks so much!
One Q though! What if I changed to a new theme. What needs to be done?
you need to buy standard theme…..!
http://standardtheme.com
no, just kidding. here’s a good read: http://tentblogger.com/right-wordpress-theme/
I mean, if I select a theme other than twentyten or twentyeleven,I do not know where to insert the blogger.php file. How do I know where to insert this?
into the theme files folder. via ftp.
Anywhere in the theme files folder,is it? Thanks!
im getting a message saying
“You’re about to be redirected… blah blah blah”
is there a way to get rid of this?
don’t think so.
Hi, there. I’ve completed all the steps in this tutorial impeccably (as far as I can tell!) and am still having this problem that I can’t seem to figure out:
The root of my old blog redirects to the new one fine (i.e. if you go to feedyourselfonsixdollarsaday.blogspot.com, it redirects to sixdollarsaday.com where my new WordPress blog is). However, if I click on an old link (i.e. when I Google “vegan breakfast smoothie,” the second result that comes up is from the old version of my blog, at Blogger; when you click that link, it gives you an error message instead of redirecting to the WordPress version of the post like it’s supposed to.)
Also, FWIW, no matter how many times I copy and paste the code, my blogger.php file weighs in at 550 bytes whereas yours in the tutorial seems to be 571…could this have something to do with it?
I feel like I’m so close here, but the fact that none of my Google links are clickable anymore seems to defeat the whole purpose!
Thanks for any help you can provide…
looks like it’s adding “?m=1″ to the end of the link… can you see where that’s happening?
http://i.john.do/GSK5
Never seen this kind of useful post…….
Thanks,
To make this work on my site I had to change:
$old_url = $_GET['q'];
to
$old_url = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
Hope this helps someone and it isn’t documented elsewhere……