How to move from Blogger to Wordpress – the whole story

Recently, i had moved from blogger to wordpress – to a new host.It was not a cakewalk and i came across many hurdles while doing so.Yet, I’ve managed to retain my traffic and Google juice.
In the light of my experience, here are a few tips for you to watch out for if you are planning a migration from blogger to wordpress without losing your valuable traffic and google juice..
I’ve tried to make this a consolidated post including the Migration process – The SEO factors involved and coping with the after effects of it.If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Smooth transfer of your posts.
The biggest bottleneck when moving from blogger to wordpress is to move or copy your posts to the new host.
Earlier, there was a plugin to get this done. But now,since Blogger has updated it’s feed – it’s broken.

But, Wordpress has upgraded it’s version(2.2.1 as of today) and the Import feature is now well equipped to import your blogger posts from it’s RSS feed.
So all you got to do is make sure that your WP installation is up to date. If your host provides the old one, grab the latest version from www.wordpress.org and install it yourself.Directions to install Wordpress here

Importing the posts from Blogger
Go to your Wordpress Dashboard > Manage > Import > Blogger

On selecting Blogger, it would ask for granting permission to access your google account.
Login with the email account you blog on Blogger, and click the “Grant Permission” button.
Presto! That’s it. posts imported.

Note
Wordpress imports your posts from the RSS reader.So, if there are any additions to your RSS feeds, like footer text, etc – remove it from the blog feed settings or those text also will appear on your new posts.(For live example, see my posts imported frm blogger, you would see a “Visit the blog for more articles” text beneath every post.)

Tweaking your Wordpress.

Go to your .htaccess file via Control panel>File Manager and make it writable(CHMOD666)
Customize your permalinks

Dealing with Categories – In your blogger account you could have posted articles in multiple lables, so take some time and prune those categories in each post. This could be time consuming but, it helps in the long run.So you better make it right now.

Part 2 – Letting Google know.

After successfully setting up your Wordpress blog and importing posts, it’s time to let the Search Engines know.

- For this, go to your Google Webmasters account and add the new domain there.
- Do the verification as Google suggests.
- Make a sitemap
Create a sitemap of your new site using this sitemap generator tool and save the sitemap.xml file to your new hosts root directory(newdomain.com/sitemap.xml).
- Go to your Google Webmasters account dashboard > Select the new domain > Sitemaps and submit the new sitemap url there.

Now, you have to wait for 3-4 days for the google bots to crawl your site. A smart way to make this quicker is to get someone link to you.

As google crawls the new site, it will show the number of URL’s crawled in the statistics tab. It would be the same as listed in your sitemap.xml file.

Now, check if there are any broken url’s in your statistics. If there are, download the CSV file.

This is again a time consuming task – you got to check all your posts and check for broken links in it and correct it.I can’t find a plugin or tweak to beat it – if you know, please let me know.

Now, that Google has indexed both your new domain and old blogger account – goto the blogger account and delete the blog.

It’s also a good idea to request deletion of content from Google. But I’m not sure if they will entertain it if your blog isa small one, say with less than 100 posts. I really don’t know the criteria by which they decide whether or not to approve deletion from the Index, but they declined me.

Note – Ask all your backlinks(search for link:yourolddomain.com on Google) to correct their links to your new domain. Write them an email – it works!