Figured it out: Redirecting from Blogger to Wordpress (different domains)

About a week ago I posted a thread asking how to redirect from Blogger to Wordpress. It's not possible to set up redirects on Blogger to another domain so I just gave up.

I figured it out and found that there are no good guides out there on Google how to do this. There are 100's of articles, but they are all copies of each other. I hope this can be used to help people move their site from blogger to wordpress.


Why I wanted to move

I wanted to possibly sell the site, but since the blogger site is unsellable (but doing much better than the newly created wordpress site) I wanted to redirect all traffic so that it would all go to the wordpress site.

Problems

The blogger site is receiving a lot of traffic, but 90% of those are from individual posts and not the domain, which are ranking highly for multiple keywords.

I didn't know what would happen if I just redirected the domain. What would happen to those posts?


The Solution

1. The first problem was blogger's url structure for posts, which shows the date, then title, then .html.

You have to go into your wordpress dashboard SETTINGS >> PERMALINKS and set up a custom permalink structure that looks like this:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

NOTE: This will change all your existing and future post URL structure to from this >> www,examplesite,com/examplepost
to this>>
www,examplesite,com/2012/08/examplepost,html

I don't know the effects of this on the serps for my existing posts. Their url structure has changed, but when you click on the serp listings, they just go automatically to the same post with the new url structure.


2. Second step was to import all the posts to my wordpress site. This can be done from your wordpress dashboard by just going to TOOLS >> IMPORT >> BLOGGER. After that, it will import all your blogger posts to your wordpress.

NOTE: they will be published right away. They don't get imported to a draft status!

Another thing to note is that they are set published dates on the day that they were published in your blogger blog. Not the day you imported and published on your new wordpress site.

That's a good thing because...the url's will be the same.
www,bloggersite,com/2012/06/example.html will import automatically to
www,wordpress,com/2012/06/example.html even if you import them on December of 2018.

BLOGGER's URL exclusion of words
One thing I noticed was that Blogger excluded the words "the, a" from URL's. (These are by default. If you set up your own custom permalinks on blogger then you probably don't have to worry. Wouldn't hurt to double check, though).

Maybe there are other excluded words, too but these are the ones I personally dealt with.

That means that if you have a post titled: "The Best Way to Get a Job"...
Your blogger url will probably be:
www,bloggersite,com/2012/06/best-way-to-get-job.html

But when you import the post to wordpress, it will import with the URL:
www,wordpresssite,com/2012/06/the-best-way-to-get-a-job.html

This is really important to go change in your settings because when you click on a serp listing of that original blogger post, it will redirect to: www,wordpresssite,com/2012/06/best-way-to-get-job.html

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Redirecting the DOMAIN

1. Now, we have to redirect the domain. Go into Blogger for your site. Go to settings and cancel the custom domain that you have set up. Your site will now be www,something,blogspot,com instead of your previous site with the custom domain.

2. Then go into your domain registrar settings. Set up a permanent forward to your new wordpress site. (You can find instructions on how to do this on Google. It's simple).

3. Wait until the changes take place. Until they do, any serp listings you have will lead to NOT FOUND.

After the redirect is set in place, all existing posts will redirect to their proper imported post on your wordpress site. Any serp listings for your existing blogger site will redirect and you will get traffic to the new wordpress site.

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IMAGES
After this, make sure that you save any images that show up in your new posts that are hosted on your blogger site. Just go into the edit post, save the image, delete it, then re-upload it into the post so that your wordpress site is now hosting the same image.

After you have done all of this, go back into Blogger, and delete the blog.
Some people advise you to keep the blog up (since your images are hosted on blogger).

You can do this, but you'll need to unpublish the posts so that you don't have two sites with the exact same posts. It's just much cleaner to reupload the images and delete the blog.

You're done.