How to redirect Blogger Beta to WordPress.com (Laffers.net)

This was originally a post at Laffers.net, but I’m getting constant timeouts to that site, so I’m going to repost it here, just in case Laffers.net has gone down.
This copy was captured by the Google Cache as it appeared on 24 Dec 2009 04:44:07.

I refer to this article in the following two posts of mine:
So you want to move from Blogger to a WordPress blog & Things I learnt when migrating from Blogger

If you are like me and have decided to move your blog from blogspot.com to wordpress.com (the shared WordPress hosting site), you are asking yourself three questions:

How to redirect visitors to the old blog automatically to the new pages.
How to transfer the PageRank of your old blog to the new one.
How to prevent being penalized by Google for duplicate content.

Is it possible ? Read on.

First of all, let me give credit where credit is due – there are some instructions already published

Tom Sherman has a nice manual for moving from the old Blogger to self-hosted WordPress.
[TechCounter] similar to the one above but contains erroneous information about preserving PageRank.
(TechCounter link broke 2013 – http://www.techcounter.com/wordpress/301-permanent-redirect-from-blogger-beta-to-wordpress/?cp=2#comments)
Webbleyou is a tutorial for migrating from Blogger Beta, but I find it unnecessarily complicated.

Bottomline: None of those tutorials work for moving to the shared hosting on WordPress.com!

how to do it

Here are the answers to the three questions:

Redirect your visitors by combining JavaScript and meta tag redirects. Read below.
Bad news, this is not possible. Tom Sherman correctly states

This would require a 301 Permanent Redirect and access to the server, not provided by Blogger.
If you don’t want to be punished by Google for duplicating content you must remove the old blog from the Google cache and tell it to ignore the old site from now on. Read below below.

set up redirects

I’m assuming that at this point you have imported your posts to the new blog at WordPress.com (if not, go to “Manage/Import”, select the obvious choice and do what you’re said).

Log into your Blogger account and click your way through the awkward navigation menu until you are at the “Template/Edit HTML” page. To redirect visitors from the main page, insert the following between the <head> and </head> tags:

<meta content='6;url=http://yournewblog.wordpress.com/' http-equiv='refresh'/>

Number 6 means that the redirection will take effect after 6 seconds. Replace the url with your own.

The tricky part comes now. We want to redirect users from individual post pages to the corresponding post pages on the new blog. For that, we need a piece of JavaScript spiced with Blogger proprietary tags. Insert the following right after “<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>” in the template:

<b:widget id='Redirector' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'> <b:includable id='main'> <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'> <b:loop values='data:posts' var='post'> <script type='text/javascript'> var new_page='yournewblog.wordpress.com/'; var permalink = '<data:post.url/>'; var timestamp = '<data:post.timestamp/>'; timestamp = timestamp.split('/'); timestamp = timestamp[2]+'/'+timestamp[0]+'/'+timestamp[1]; new_page = permalink.replace(/youroldblog\.blogspot\.com\/2007\/[0-9]{2}/,new_page+timestamp); new_page = new_page.replace(/\.html$/,''); document.location.href = new_page; </script> </b:loop> </b:if> </b:includable> </b:widget>

Don’t forget to enter your new blog’s URL at var new_page = .

Important note! For this script to work, all your posts should have been imported to WordPress.com using their Manage/Import function. The creation dates of all posts must match, because they are part of the permalinks.

remove duplicate content

Insert the following between the <head> and </head> tags:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"/>

After seeing this, search engines should remove your old blog from their cache and the old content will stop existing for them. Therefore they are not going to penalize your new blog for duplicate content.

optionally, display a message

This is not required, but helpful for your readers. Tell them that you have moved and that they are going to be redirected. Right after the <body> tag, insert this:

<div style='position: absolute; top: 30px; left: 30px; border: solid 2px #333; color: #000; background-color: yellow; padding: 5px; width: 400px; z-index: 5; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;'> <p><strong>My blog has moved!</strong></p> <p>You should be automatically redirected in 6 seconds. If not, visit<br/> <a href='http://yournewblog.wordpress.com/'> <strong>http://yournewblog.wordpress.com</strong></a> <br/> and update your bookmarks.</p> </div>

Well, now we are set. Found any errors in this tutorial or have more tips? Share them in the comments please. 🙂