1 May sees the ending of Bloggers FTP publishing service so hopefully you have sorted your Blogger blogs by now, either by importing to WordPress or by setting up a sub domain. As your blog is an important part of the SEO of your website as it provides a place for new content to be added to the site in a place that pings Google when these updates are made.
If you have not yet done this I thought this quick guide to how easy migrating a Blogger blog can be would help as there are only a few days of publishing left.
The first thing to do is contact your domain hosting company and to set up a sub domain for the site such as blog.yourdomain.co.uk. Once this is done you need to point the new sub domain at ghs.google.com to create the connection between the domain and your blog. This change could take between 24 and 48 hours to propagate across the internet.
Once you have your sub domain set up log into Blogger and on the Dashboard you will see a yellow note about blog migration with a link to start your migration. Click on this link to begin the process.
The first screen in the migration is to create a backup file of the blog content from what is currently on Blogger. Doing this ensures that none of your content is lost during the move.
The next step allows you to tell Google the address of your new blog and on this screen you will enter the sub domain you have created. Once you click “Continue” on this screen Blogger checks to make sure that your domain has been set up and pointed at Blogger correctly. If all is working OK and your domain has fully propagated Blogger will display a “Hosted by Blogger” message on the next screen.
The next set of options shows the 301 options where Blogger will update the existing content on you blog via FTP to add a canonical URL (telling Google that the actual address of the blog is your new sub domain) and to add in a meta redirect to the pages on the old blog to take users to the new blog address. You can add your email address on this screen so Blogger can email you once the changes to your blog are complete. I’d recommend doing this as if your blog is quite large this could take an hour to update.
Once Blogger confirms that these changes have been made and uploaded you are given a “verify” button which will create the message “verification successful, blog migration is complete”. Once you see this message click “finish”.
One note on the 301 changes screen is that I have come across a couple of blogs where the upload of files from Blogger failed. If this is the case you can manually upload the data to your server as Blogger provide a download option if the FTP upload doesn’t work.
Obviously if you are not planning on updating your blog for a week or so this will give you some time to work on the migration of your Blogger blog to a WordPress blog with the added benefits of using WordPress for your blogging solution.
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