Moving from Blogspot to blog hosted on our domain

[Bee159]

Hi there, I work for a furniture retailer in the UK and I have a question about moving our blog.

We have had a blog at www.ourcompany.blogspot.co.uk since 2012 and it was last updated mid 2014. There are about 100 posts and the content is actually really good, not spammy in any way and not stuffed with links to our site. The content is essentially guides to buying the right furniture.

We have now launched blog functionaility on our website at www.ourcompany.co.uk/blog as I feel this is a better long-term solution to increasing site traffic and page rank.

I want to pick your brains on the best way to handle the old content.

• A: Copy all the Blogspot content across and back date it to the same date it was originally published and then delete the old Blogspot account? Or will Google see this as duplicate content.

• B: Backup all the Blogspot content now, delete the Blogspot account and then repost this content at a later date? Will this still be seen as duplicate content?

• something else.

Thanks for reading.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

I don't think either of those good options...Why don't you just redirect the blog to your new domain?

• Ruben

[Bee159]

Hi Ruben thanks for your reply. Could you explain why those aren't good options and when you say redirect, what you mean by that? A 301 on all Blogspot content to ourwebsite.com/blog or something else?

Thank you.

Benjita.

[Bee159]

Hellooooo! Does anyone else have any thought on this? Thank you.

[Aleyda]

Hi Benjita,

The best way would be to migrate the content that you still want to keep (the one that is getting visits from your users, getting organic search visibility, rankings and traffic) from the old blog: www.ourcompany.blogspot.co.uk to the new address at: www.ourcompany.co.uk/blog/ (great choice on using a subdirectory for the blog, btw, since it's usually better than subdomains).

In order to do this, the best is to implement 301 redirects from the old blog URLs to their new addresses:

www.ourcompany.blogspot.co.uk/blog-post-here.html 301 redirect to www.ourcompany.co.uk/blog/blog-post-here.html

In order not only to take your users from the old to the new destination, but also pass the link popularity value from the old to the new, and be able to keep the rankings that the old ones were getting.

If at some point you decide that you don't want to take certain content to the new location, then it's recommended that you assess what will be the impact of it: Is content that is getting a lot of traffic and ranking well? Is it because it is duplicated or non-relevant content anymore? If at some point it is getting organic search visibility and traffic then you might want to redirect this content to pages in the new blog location that will address the same information: For example, if you had a post A and post B talking about the same topic and you want to only enable a post A in the new blog, then 301 redirect post B to the post A at the new location, the relevance will be kept and you will be able to consolidate it all in a more relevant, better organized Web architecture. So this can be seen as an opportunity for you to improve your current organization.

Besides implementing 301 redirects from each of the old URLs to their new addresses on the new blog, it's also important that you:

• Update links going to the  URLs in the old blog to the new one
• Generate an XML sitemap for the new blog, create a Google Search Console profile for it and make sure you submit it.

Check out migration best practices at: https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos and https://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

I hope this helps!

Aleyda

[Bee159]

Thanks for your reply. however the one issue I have is with 301 redirects - I have Googled but I don't think it is possible to do this with Blogspot.

If I were to backup all the content, then delete the Blogspot account, wait a month then repost some of the content back onto ourdomain.co.uk/blog/ would Google likely penalise that content?

[Bee159]

Can anyone else shed any light on this? Many thanks.