Vancouver SEO

Short answer, yes.

This little science experiment blog I started has gone through many tests and changes.  I started it as two completely identical free blogs, one on Wordpress.com and another on Blogspot.com.  I wanted to see if the scary myth of the “duplicate content” penality was true.  I quickly discovered that it wasn’t (and then 4 months later, Matt Cutts announced that duplicate content was no longer an issue…  and no, I’m not taking credit for that).

I got bored with my little experiment, and frustrated with Wordpress.com’s refusal to allow a user to edit the template file without paying them money, so I killed the wordpress version and stuck with the blogspot version.  I quickly learned how counter-intuative that was as blogspot is the single most SEO unfriendly blogging software available!  Seriously.  Blogspot comes with built in repeating meta titles on every page, no option for meta description or keywords, and the bloody thing can’t even resize images properly.  I absolutely hated it…  but, I took it as a challenge.  If I could get the blog to rank with repeating title tags, crummy archive pages that dupe everything, and ugly images, I can do anything!

After a while, I managed to grab a dropped domain “vancouver-seo.com”.  Couldn’t pass it up, as I am and SEO, and whatta know, I live in Vancouver!  So, I went through the process of pointing a custom domain to blogspot.  Eventually, all my blogspot urls got happily replaced with Vancouver-SEO.com urls.  All my collegues cheered and hoisted me on their shoulders.  I got a big raise and promotion at my company.  Peace broke out in the Middle East.

A few months passed, and all my friends and collegues were raving about all the great wordpress plugins and how SEO friendly it was, and I started to feel like I was being shunned.  People would snicker and whisper as I walked past, my girlfriend stopped talking to me, and the housing market collapsed in the US.  Didn’t they know my blog was a PR2?  Weren’t they aware I was the only site ranking for dduupplliiccaattee ccoonntteenntt?  Apparently, it was time to move over to WordPress.

But how?  Every Google entry I found said that it couldn’t be done!  Unless, of course, you copy your entire blog, post for post, then delete the old one and hope the search engines figure it out.  Forget that!  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be really easy.  So, here you go, the secret formula for redirecting a blogspot blog to a wordpress one (note: you have to host the wordpress one yourself (although, I think you could do it on the free wp site)).

Step 1: Go to GoDaddy and buy a domain name. It doesn’t have to be GoDaddy, it can be any domain name provider (blogspot lets you do it too).  If you can, find your blogspot subdomain as a .com (if your site is britneyspearssextape.blogspot.com, you might have some trouble with step 1).

Step 2: Point your blogspot subdomain to your new domain name. You can find it in the blogspot settings (or follow the link above).

Step 3: Wait for Google to do its thing. You want to make sure that Google fully indexes your blog under the new domain name.  It will make things a lot easier.  It can take a while (like months), so don’t be afraid to keep posting (it’ll make Google want to respider your site).

Step 4: Buy a hosting account. This is where you’ll want to set up your new wordpress version of your blog.  If you’ve already got one, then why did you go with blogspot in the first place?!?

Step 5 (optional): Get all the indexed pages from Google. You’ll need this in case you want to do any redirects.  The site: command is your friend (ie. site:britneyspearssextape.com).

Step 6:  DNS Settings and Blog Setup. This is the fun part.  Godaddy has really easy DNS management, and will automatically take care of your settings if your point your domain to their hosting servers.  If you have a different DNS than hosting server, go hire a UNIX admin.  I can’t (read: won’t) help you there.  Now, set up your wordpress blog on the domain name.  I’d recommend you do it quickly (takes 5 minutes to install WordPress, remember).  Once its installed, go to the Admin page, under “Tools” go to “Import” and pick “Blogger”.  It’ll ask you to log into your blogspot account, and then confirm, and confirm, and confirm again, but after all that, there’s literally a “magic” button.  After a few minutes, all your posts will be migrated over to your new wordpress blog.  Pretty awesome!

Step 7:  Clean up. Now, to make things easier on myself, I changed the permalink settings in WordPress to follow the blogspot url permalink (which is domainname.com/year/month/postname.html).  You can do that by going to “Settings” – “Permalinks” and use a custom structure (I used /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html).  Doing this is going to save you doing a bunch of redirects.  And speaking of redirects, I recommend the redirection plugin.  The person who wrote this is a bloody genius.

One thing I noticed is that blogspot will automatically drop conjunctions like “the” and “a” and “and” from its url structure.  Wordpress doesn’t do this by default (there’s a plugin or something you can use to change it, but I didn’t bother).  So this is where the redirection plugin is super rad.  Now, when I migrated my site, some of the old urls seemed to magically automatically redirect, which was awesome.  If yours doesn’t, then use the redirect plugin (or hack through your .htaccess file…  whichever you prefer).  The only pages for me that didn’t automatically redirect were the archive pages.  So, after that, you’re done.  Enjoy your unique meta titles, descriptions, and wicked plugins!

Now, here’s the caveat.  I’m not sure how this will affect my search rankings.  I’m about 97% confident I’m in the clear (Google spidered my site mid-migration, the buggers), and I clicked through all my indexed pages, and everything resolves like it should (I did have to reset my analytics and Webmaster Tools activation, but whatever).  So, all should be well…  but, if you see me complaining in a week or so about how I dropped out of the SERPs for “dduupplliiccaattee ccoonntteenntt”, well you’ll know the answer…