Life was easy when I set up this blog (and others) way back in May 2005 using Blogger's friendly FTP service. Then in January 22 of this year, Blogger announced that they are shutting down FTP access in March -- since pushed back to May 1, 2010 -- and had set up a blog and some migration tools to help users shift to other Blogger-supported methods. It's good to know that switching to a simple blogging method would be easy and painless -- but I don't trust Blogger now and want to maintain some of our traffic. So I have decided to switch over to WordPress (which I've been admiring for a while anyway) and see if I can continue to maintain the same web addresses for our blogs. Some things may change -- such as the RSS feeds (from what I have read) and certainly the blogging interface -- but I hope to pull off the switch with a minimum of downtime and no change to our link structure (fingers crossed). Here are some guides I have been reading on the subject, in case you are in the same boat:
- FTP Publishing on Blogger to WordPress: Migration Guide by Ravi
- Migrating from Blogger to WordPress (FTP Blogs) by Ben Frain
Be sure to check the comments area here, which suggests it may actually be easier than he says. - Move from Blogger to WordPress without Losing GoogleRank by Jason Fitzpatrick at Lifehacker
- Migrate Your Blog from Blogger to WordPress with All the Google Juice by Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration
- Move from Blogger to WordPress and Maintain Permalinks and Traffic by Arpit Jacob
3 comments:
Hi- I am another trapped in the ftp pit of blogger! Two of my blogs are very highly ranked in their area (online learning and educational technology) - with more than 10,000 posts on one that I began when blogger was owned by Pyra Labs ... the other has 7,500 posts. The search engine rankings are dear to me (these are non profit blogs hosted at the University of Illinois). I will follow you. Please pass along any info to those who are dangling over the blogger pit!
Thanks for sharing what you learn about WordPress alternatives to keep the same URL and RSS.
I'm in a similar boat. I have actually been using WordPress as my platform for all my blogs for over a year now... but I still have a bunch of old ftp blogger posts (some of which have good search rankings) that I'm now worried about because of this.
I had been thinking of trying to switch using the blogger system.. but I agree that I don't really trust them.. I'd prefer just to have all of those old blog posts on my own WordPress system...
But I'm worried about how hard it will be and I'm very worried about the structure of the URLs changing and losing the search rankings and direct traffic...
Ah.. I'm hoping this isn't going to be as big of a pain as it seems like it will be.
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