Import blog from Blogger.com into WordPress – The final chapter

Few days ago, I post Import blog from Blogger.com into WordPress – Free your blog with freedom on my site. In the past few days, I got many requests about what to do after the import process. One of my readers Missy have successfully import her blog from http://www.veggie-blog.com/ to http://groovyvegetarian.wordpress.com/ As I said earlier, there are works to do to finish up the rest of import process.

There are major issues when import from Blogger.com to WordPress.com or self-host WordPress blog.

These is my response to Missy’s question.

1. The images 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. Having Fun? I personally more all my blog photos to AOL Pictures. Here are my reasons.
2. All of the categories are 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 sites. 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. Based on my personal experience, I will do the following steps to clean up.

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.
   

   <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow, noarchive” />
   <meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex, follow, noarchive” />

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. Or you can just leave alone forever.
6. [Updated] For the posts older than 3 months, you should not worry too much about it. It’s probably already in the supplement results even they are not duplicated. You do need to work on those recently post to avoid the duplication. Instead of doing #1, the other way is to add extra text (10%-20% more) or to re-phrase some sentence to make the import post more content and more attractive and move your picture to different location in the paragraph. This should be easier than #1 step.

These is just my personal experience.

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