[Updated 2007-06-20] After posting this topic, I have received many requests to talk about more clean up tasks after import blogger.com to WordPress blog. Here you go! Import blog from Blogger.com into WordPress – The final chapter
20 years ago, people asked for your phone number for contact. 10 years ago, people asked for e-mail to contact you. Now everyone must have an email address, and a web site. Just for the past few years, everyone were asked for a blog address. Blogger, one of the first free blog web site, provides free blog space for everyone who want to write up something. Most of people are writing something for themselves or families to share their photos or life.
A free service is good, but it lacks freedom. Blogger has been a number one choice for spammer to create dummy pages for marketing and SEO (Search engine optimization) purpose. So a lotof people don’t visit them anymore. Now WordPress is number one blog system that gives you more freedom to blog the way you want. Of course, Blogger.com gives a lot of flexibility to do thing you want. WordPress gives you more control. It also has huge communities to support new features and plug-ins.
There is also a free WordPress services at WordPress.com. Again, free doesn’t means freedom. So it’s better off to setup your own WordPress and host on your own. So how do you convert your Blogger.com blog into WordPress?
Basically, you need to import all your posts from Blogger.com to WordPress
First of all, you need to make sure you have WordPress 2.2 installed. You can download it from WordPress.org. The earlier version doesn’t support Blogger import. Let’s assume that you have customize your WordPress 2.2 the way you want. And you just want to import the blog posts.
So here are the process.
Open your WordPress admin section and go to Manage tab. There is an import option. You should see the Blogger option.
Before you can import any post, you need to make sure you have a Google account that is used to login to your Blogger.com. If you are using the old blogger.com layout with your own email address. You will need to first convert to the new Blogger.com account with a Google account. It’s free to get Google account, which can be helpful for your blogging life. You will be asked to authenticate your new WordPress blog to access your Blogger.com account.
If you have not login to Google account, it will prompt you to login. It will ask you to grant access to your Blogger.com account from you WordPress.
Once you successfully login into Blogger account, you have the choice to import your blogs. If you have more than one blogs, you can import them one at a time.
It will notify you that how many posts have been import to your new WordPress blog.
Now you have most of your posts in your WordPress blog. Well. There are problems with this import process. So you have a lot of work to do to clean your blog.
1. It will not import the images from your blogger.com. It will reference the image. It’s not safe to use Blogger.com to store you images. So you will have to manually upload your image to a new photo sharing service such as Photobucket.com or AOL Pictures. I personally recommend AOL Pictures with unlimited space for free.
2. It will import all your tags as categories. So suddenly you have tons new categories import to your WordPress at the top level. You will have to manually change them to make it more meaningful.
3. It will not import your comment correctly. The link in the comment may get lost. I don’t really pay attention on this, since all posts will be treated as new posts on your WordPress. It will be re-indexed by search engine.
4. It will not import your sidebar links, widget, add-ons, css and layout. So you will customize your layout in WordPress, which you have the freedom to do whatever you want.
Playing with WordPress is fun and time consuming, if you want to make it looks awesome. There are a lot of resources on the Internet that you can find to help you make your WordPress blog a success.
Few more thing you need to do.
1. Install WordPress plug-ins to enhance your blog. Here are some of the Plug-ins that Clazh recommends.
2. Customize your layout to make it simple and clean. So it’s easy for reader to read.
3. Add widget to communicate with all your friends on MyBlogLog, Bumpzeeand BlogCatalog
4. Install AdSense or any other advertisement based Javascript, if you want to make money on you blog.
5. Install Google Analytic to track your blog traffic
I hope this is helpful to many of my readers, who are new to WordPress.
Great post. I’ve bookmarked this and will read it again tomorrow. Thanks for the info…
By the way, you’ve been tagged. Hope you can participate,
–Steve
http://www.cymru66.com/blogging/another-tagging-game/
Steve:
Sure! Sounds good. I am trying to figure out who I should tag… you will see that soon .. Cool!
Ah, it’s a bit of fun at the end of the day, plus it’s a free link to your site…
I’ll check back sometime to see who you’ve tagged. Could be some more Technorati favorites for me to add.
Later,
–Steve
Wow, I just knew if WordPress can import Blogger. But then, I still use 2.1. Pretty lazy to upgrade though.
Good stuff Terence!
I love WordPress
Steve:
Yes. I have post the “You’ve been tagge.d”
http://www.terencechang.com/2007/06/16/youve-been-tagged-an-interesting-blog-promotion-tricks/
Aldian:
Thank you for visit. I was using WordPress 2.1 a way back and decided to start over. Since I have my blog backup at Blogger.com, I re-import most of them after I have WordPress 2.2 up.
I like WordPress too!
A lot people thinking of moving from wordpress to blogger should find this post useful. I was in the process of writing a similar post. By the way I the link is to my about page and those are the plugins I am currently using
sorry I meant from blogger to wordpress
Arpit Jacob:
You scares me the big time. I thought I did not know “People are converting to Blogger.com”
Yes. After reading your “About” page, I download whole bunch of the plug-ins and used it on my blog as well.
Thanks!
I should upgrade to 2.2 then
Terence: If i am able to transfer my blogs from blogger to wrodpress, through your post above, i will be forever endebted to you. Super thanxs for posting this and helping me move to WordPress. You are the man!!!! Tommorrow or tonite, i will attempt the transfer, i will keep you updated on my move and let you know if i have any questions. I’m off to promote this post for you like promised. Thanxs, again. Missy.
Missy:
I hope you successfully transfer your blog to WordPress. That is what I did before. Well. Of course, there are work to clean up the rest, but it worth to be on WordPress.
Good luck!
I blog professionally over at keetsa!, and it is based in wordpress, so i am quite familiar with its interface. The servers and ftp stuff, that i’m not familiar with. But i am willing to learn. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
I tried to import my blogger blog into WordPress once. It froze and goofed up my blogger account!!! So I won’t be trying this again.
clangnuts:
I am sorry to hear that. I am not sure what happened. I can only guess that you have a lot of post or you are using the old template.
You can visit WordPress.org forum and find some help there. I like WordPress a lot.
Hi—Terence: Check it out, i was able to transfer my posts from blogger to my new wordpress blog. yippee! What should i be looking out for, with the change?
http://groovyvegetarian.wordpress.com/
the theme is not final, i am still looking for a really cool one.
Missy:
Good job! It was not that hard, was it? Look like you have your comments convert as well.
Now. it’s the fun and hard part.
1. Remember what I say in the post. Your image are still hosted on Blogger.com, which will soon be deleted because you are linking them from your new blog with non-blogspot.com domain. My was deleted by blogger.com in few days. So suddenly all your image are missing, which will annoy your reader. So move them to somewhere and re-link them in every post. Fun?
2. All of the categories are all in the top level, you might want to reorganize them before your blog get indexed by search engine. If you mouse over the categories, you see the URL have /tag/ in there, which supposed to be /category/ in wordpress. This is not a big deal, but just not well structured, in my opinion.
3. This is the most important part. Now you have the new blog which have exactly the same content as your old one. Have your old one being indexed on Google? If yes, now you have duplicate content on both site. You will soon find that most of you post on either your new one or old one are in the Google Hell (supplemental result), which will put you at the bottom of the search result.
There is no easy solution for this. However, I still trying to clean my mass after convert from Blogger to WordPress by doing the following.
1. Remove 80% of the text from each of your post on blogger and make it look like excerpt and create “read more” link and point it to the new post on your wordpress.com
2. Change the template on your old blogger.com to use the following meta tag.
3. Use the WordPress Google sitemap plug-in to submit the new blog.
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final
IMPORTANT. Do not do this until you have reorganized your new blog the way you want.
4. Go to Google Webmaster tool and register your Google Sitemap
5. Get a hit counter (ex. StatCounter.com) and installed it on your old blogger.com and make sure there is no more incoming traffic to your old blog before you delete them from blogger.com
I think it’s too long to put in the comments. I will try to come up a new post for this issue later.
Good luck!
Sorry… In the meta tag, I meant to say noindex, follow, noarchive.
Change nofollow to follow. You want the search engine not to index, archive, but do follow the link to your new blog.
wowza! i have my work cut out for me, now. oh boy! first i want to say i really appreciate your help, i would not be able to get in this mess without you. wait, that didn’t come out right. lol. these are all points i would not know about if you had not told me, so thank you thank you. i am most concerned about the dup content issue, i don’t want to be in google hell. i’m a bit scared about all this, but i am gonna do as you suggest above and hopefully all will be alright. i will come back and keep you updated. thanxs, missy. laters.
Missy:
Just to encourage you a little. I have many many pages in Google hell. However, those pages are old and very old. So I don’t really care about those been in the hell. However, I have some unique topic in those post. So when people search certain things with those keywords. It comes up number 1 on Google, even it’s still in the Google Hell.
Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! jcstwzaochelg
Great post – I am having troubles with wordpress… you can read about them here http://www.rosshetherington.com/?p=51
Ross:
I have left comment on your post. Great blog!
Nice info. I will get a website and have wordpress installed b4 I import from blogger into wordpress
When doing this will I have to delete the contents in my previous blog account to prevent duplicate content from search engines?
@Magnus:
I am glad that you like the information. I hope you enjoy WordPress. Thank you for stopping by!
@Magnus:
You don’t and can’t delete your page from Search Engine without a painful process. However, you can reduce your chance to be list under Google Hell. I bet Google have changed their search engine to treat a page as duplicate content. I would recommend to change your post on Blogger.com and point to your real post on wordPress. This is just a way to reduce the chance, but not to cure the situation.
Thank you Terence. Your site is always useful.
@Katrineholm:
Thank you! I have never regret moving my blog to wordpress. I am really enjoying blogging.
Great tut
keep up the good work
I was curious about switching from blogger to wordpress on your own domain. I have had trouble trying to get the posts imported but it just will not work for me. Have you tried this with your blog being hosted on its own domain?
@Sharon:
Looks like you are using your own domain to host your blog from BlogSpot. When you try to export the blog posts to your own blogs. It actually read the blog from your own domains through blogspot, and then to your own domain. If your server has slow connection or limited bandwidth, it will slow down the process or even drop.
So you might want to do that while it’s low time like midnight. Good luck to you!
Will definately come in useful once i import mmy older blog (from blogger) to wordpress on my newly purchased server.
Thanks.
@Darkzune:
You seem to run a well blog already . Thank you for visiting.
hi,
I’m having problem connecting to google during import my blog. Hereby the error :
Could not connect to https://www.google.com
There was a problem opening a secure connection to Google. This is what went wrong:
Unable to find the socket transport “ssl” – did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP? (0)
Thank you for creating with WordPress | Documentation | Feedback | Version 2.3.3
I hope you can help me solve it.
tq.
@Jebatfx:
I think you need to talk to your web hosting company to enable the SSL in you PHP.INI. It many not allows you to communicate with Google SEVER to authenticate your account on blogger.
is there any way to import the latest posts into WP as soon as they come into my blgr?
@Muneeb:
I am not aware any software to do so, because it will generate the duplicate content. It will eventually hurt both your blogs.
yeah but im doing it cuz i want both of my blogs 2 b same.. since the blogger.com has an email a new post feature n its easyy to just email the post..
n also the blogspot address is blocked in some places
i dont mind both blogs being the same as long as my friends read it
After importing, what’s next? What about the name/domain name? And is the traffic going to be effected by the transfer to wordpress? Because I have a personal/travel blogger.com blogs who have a good amount of regular and new visitors. I am vary about the possibility that they will not find my blog anymore if I transfer to wordpress. Please, please enlighten.
Hi,
I wrote these http://tjantunen.com/2007/03/21/import-blogger-posts-to-wordpress/
simple instructions how to import blogger beta posts to wordpress easily and without using any plugins.
Once I’ve imported my blog from blogger to wordpress, can I delete my blogger? Or will that result in deleting my newly imported posts at wordpress? Thank you =)
I just wanted to ask about what happens to the links in the Blogger site, do they get transferred also or will they be permanently gone? Second question: do I have to have WordPress 2.2, as there is 2.7 and 2.7.1 now? Thanks for your help, I have 2 blogger sites to move to WordPress and I will host them with hostgator.
Teri:
Anything link to your blogspot blog will be gone if you close them. So you will have to manually change the pointer. You can download the newest WordPress to be safe. I transferred my blog with 2.2.2 without any problem.
Thank you for stopping by. Hope I answered your questions.
Hello,
I seem to be having an error everytime I try to import Blogger into WordPress. For me it keeps saying that there is annvalid AuthSub token. What could this mean?
Thanks
Hi Ana:
Sorry for taking this long to reply your comment. Hope everything goes well. I have never had problem with AuthSub Token. It seems to me that you have not authenticate your account between Blogger and WordPress. Hope that give you some hints. Thank you for stopping by!