I got my own domain igorminar.com and changed the blogger.com settings so that the domain name blog.igorminar.com is being used instead of net3x.blogspot.com.
Except for a small hick-up with DNS cache and a weird 404 Server not Found error (described in this blog post) everything went smoothly. My plan is to keep on using Blogger's custom domain feature for a few weeks and then migrate all the content over to my own blogging engine. I'll most likely end up using Mephisto, JRuby, Glassfish and MySQL, but things can still change.
The reason why I'm moving in two phases is to keep all the referring links that point to the old urls as well as most of the search engine ranking. The Blogger's custom domain feature now redirects everything to the new urls via 301 Permanent Redirect, so hopefully the transition will be close to painless. I'm not SEO expert, but this for sure is an interesting experiment.
And for those SEO "experts" that were claiming that getting Blogger to do proper redirects after a blog move was impossible here is a little proof:
$ wget --spider net3x.blogspot.com
--16:34:30-- http://net3x.blogspot.com/
=> `index.html.2'
Resolving net3x.blogspot.com... 72.14.207.191
Connecting to net3x.blogspot.com|72.14.207.191|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://blog.igorminar.com/ [following]
--16:34:30-- http://blog.igorminar.com/
=> `index.html.2'
Resolving blog.igorminar.com... 66.249.81.121
Connecting to blog.igorminar.com|66.249.81.121|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 0 [text/html]
200 OK
5 comments:
Hi,
I had tried to move my blog to the new domain, but i have no idea to start it, can you share some opinion for me.
Thanks in advance
Hi Alan,
The first step is to get a domain of course ;-). You want to get it via a registrar that gives you good access to DNS (I use godaddy.com, but there are many of them out there).
Once you have the domain, you need to configure you blog to use it. Search blogger's help, there is a doc about how to do it. Then you need to change the DNS settings according to instructions from blogger. When that is done, you need to wait a few minutes (or hours) for the changes to take affect.
That should be it.
Now we're more than a year later, can you tell us how this has affected your traffic? I am planning to do the same, but I am a bit scared of losing traffic and links.
It's been one year already? amazing! I didn't even had time to do the second stage of the migration and set up my own blog server.
Anyway, according to google analytics there wasn't any noticeable change in the traffic pattern. The transition was very smooth...
Thanks! That's good to hear, I'm now going to switch over my own blogs!
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