A little while back we transitioned from Blogger to a self hosted WordPress solution. We did this for a variety of reasons, not least of which was SEO. But that’s for another post. What I want to talk about is how we forwarded Blogger to WordPress. I had to wade through a lot of blogs to find out a good way of doing this. Most of the entries about this process are dated to last summer, some account for Blogger 2.0, some don’t. Some account for SEO, some don’t. Some have good, well explained code, most don’t. One thing that really irked me is that none mention the new redirect window that Blogger uses.

Initially we wanted to just forward everything that went through blogspot to the new blog address, but we immediately realized that blogger won’t allow you to forward to a folder. This means that blogger absolutely will not allow you to forward to libertyinteractivemarketing.com/blog. However, they will allow you to forward to blog.libertyinteractivemarketing.com. I find this ridiculous because google gives more weight to the former example, but I digress. So we made the subdomain, and then 301 redirected from the subdomain to libertyinteractivemarketing.com/blog. So there are two redirects happening, one when you come to our Blogger (using their Custom Domain), and another when you hit the subdomain. This should be fine because no matter what, Google should take into account the final redirect as being the correct one.

The problem ended up being that there are still links on Google and the other search engines referencing our Blogger blog. We also realized that the Blogger custom domain thing made it so any hits to our blogger blog were faced with this:

This is why we can't have nice things

What we wanted

We decided we wanted the blog to remain in existence but only as a forwarding tool and we wanted to NOINDEX it so that Google wouldn’t penalize us for duplicated content. We also wanted each link for a specific Blogger post on the search engine (and in the blog itself) to forward to that same post on our new WordPress. And finally, we wanted the main Blogger page to forward to our new WordPress installation. We wanted to do this using SEO best practices, but as you’ll find, blogger makes this insanely difficult.

How We Did It

Setup Redirects

First off, you are going to want to be working in your Blogger template editor, which can be found by going to the Layout tab, and then clicking on Edit HTML.

To Redirect the front page of the blog, you cannot use any 301 good stuff. You must use HTTP refresh simply because if you try to use Blogger’s forwarding you’ll have to see that screen above asking permission to redirect. I think that’s bull poo, but so far I have no good solution to this. Put this in between your head tags.

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

Display Message to Users

You might want to theme this like your new blog's colors, perhaps not so spammy?

To make it so the user isn’t surprised when they are suddenly sent to the new page, a message is highly recommended. Put this right after your first body tag. Remember to swap out the information in there with yours.

<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>

Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties

We NoIndexed the blog itself, which was easy enough. Just throw the following code in between your head tags.

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

Forward Individual Posts

In order to make every post forward correctly you have to use very specific code. This code specifically assumes you are using SEO best practice and organizing your posts only by page title. That means www.yourblog.com/post-title. If you’re not, I recommend you head over to Procrastiblog as his solution takes into account the Blogger timestamp.

Look for this code in the Blogger Template:

<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>

Enter the following right after you find the above code. Make sure to replace “YOUR_BLOG_URL_HERE” with your new blog address.

<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'>
<div id='redirectorTitle' style='visibility:hidden'><data:post.title/></div>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var new_domain = 'YOUR_BLOG_URL_HERE'
 
function utf8_uri_encode( str ) {
  var high_code = new RegExp(/[\u0080-\uffff]+/);;
  new_str = str;;
  while( m = high_code.exec( new_str ) ) {
    new_str = new_str.replace(m,encodeURIComponent(m));;
  }
  return new_str;;
}
 
var title = document.getElementById('redirectorTitle').innerHTML;;
// [INCOMPLETE] Keep percent signs that aren't part of an octet?
title = title.replace(/&lt;[^&gt;]*?&gt;/g,'');; // remove tags
title = title.replace(/&amp;.+?;/g,'');; // remove entities
title = utf8_uri_encode(title);; // handle UTF-8 characters
title = title.toLowerCase();;
title = title.replace(/[^%a-z0-9 _-]/g,'');; // remove punctuation
title = title.replace(/\s+/g,'-');; // turn spaces into hyphens
title = title.replace(/-+/g, '-');; // collapse runs of hyphens
title = title.replace(/^-+/g,'');; // remove prefixed hyphens
title = title.replace(/-+$/g,'');; // remove suffixed hyphens
var timestamp = '<data:post.timestamp/>';
timestamp = timestamp.split('/');
timestamp = timestamp[2]+'/'+timestamp[0]+'/'+timestamp[1];
var new_page = new_domain + '/' + title + '/';;
document.location.href = new_page;
</script>
</b:loop>
</b:if>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>

Examples of how this worked for us:

Front page message and HTTP refresh redirect:
http://libertyinteractive.blogspot.com

Forwarded Post
http://libertyinteractive.blogspot.com/2008/03/functionality-before-optimization-web.html

In Conclusion

While insanely useful, especially for established blogs, one unfortunate thing is that if you had only published on yoursite.blogspot.com and you have many people linking to you, you will not be able to pass on link juice. Your page rank may suffer as a result. While you’ll be able to get your users where you want them to (post by post) and therefore improve bounce rates, you wont get the page rank benefits. Make sure to remove and noindex your old blog from Google using Google webmaster tools and next time either use a custom domain or don’t use a hosted solution. Even Typepad suffers from this.

Thanks to: Procrastiblog, and Laffers.net, as they have by far the most up to date and working examples of this stuff. They just needed a little more.

First off, what is StumbleUpon?

You can think of it as a very large boob tube of Web stuff from web pages to videos. The cool thing is it delivers Web sites to you based on your preferences (e.g. art, photography, search marketing, SEO, gadgets, real estate, etc.) You can change these preferences at will. The system learns what you like and brings you more. If only TV was this easy, right?

You can search sites from their Web site at www.stumbleupon.com or download the toolbar for Firefox IE (recommended).

While it may seem like mindless pleasure to spend hours on end stumbling just for instant satisfaction and entertainment – there really are other benefits to StumbleUpon and it can serve as an exceptional online marketing tool.

Here’s why you should use StumbleUpon:

1. Research and Discovery – you can change your interest preferences to your liking at any time.  For instance, if I am specifically looking for sites or related photos, videos on the topic of Internet marketing, SEO, SEM, etc. I can change my preference interests to show me sites related to this (Internet and Internet Tools). You can basically cut hours of research and discovery time down by stumbling instead of trying to come up with the right combination of keywords to type into search engines.

2. Surf the Web - literally and organically. We are all friends of the remote control and now you are always in control, your roommate or significant other can’t steal your Stumble toolbar from you.  For good entertainment I recommend Bizarre/Oddities, Beer, and Quizzes interests.  Sit back and channel surf – hours of pure entertainment.

3. Search – Dare I say that this may be the future of search? Well, it should be.  While the big 3 are honing their algorithms to show the most relevant results based on backlinks, content, history, etc.  StumbleUpon is backing into it by asking users to rate, review, and tag these sites.  You can actually use StumbleUpon as a search engine for immediate results (versus option 1 above).  Type in anything that you are looking for and a listing of results will show with thumbnails, number of reviews, tags and recent “thumbs up.”

4. Social Networking and Bookmarking - The community and tools on StumbleUpon (SU) are fierce. The major feature to SU is their expansive social bookmarking abilities. It’s not just one way there are multiple ways to interact and connect – you can view all your favorite sites, view sites that your friends like, that people with your interests like, blog it, talk about it, have folks review it, etc.

Maybe in a later post, I’ll touch on marketing and advertising opportunities through StumbleUpon and how they have impacted the SU community and results.

But for now, get out there and thumbs up someone today. Just don’t let the boss catch you after hours upon hours on StumbleUpon.

While this is one of the most basic concepts of PPC search engine management, it seems to be one of the least understood, and quite possibly one of the hardest to explain to folks unfamiliar with the process. The easiest way to explain this situation is mathematically.

The answer lies within the paid search venues. This includes Adwords (Google), Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter. These are the main three so we’ll focus on these for now. When setting up a PPC campaign we go about choosing the right keywords, writing persuasive ad creative, putting the finishing touches on our landing page(s), installing and testing our tracking code, etc.

Once that laundry list of to-dos is completed you assign a budget to your campaign. Now you are ready to flip the switch and the fun part begins. The paid search venue uses its NASA math to analyze your keyword list and the CTR (Clickthrough Rate) that those keywords have received across an unknown [to us] time period. Using this historical performance data, the search volume for that term is analyzed, and then the result is applied against your budget.

For example: Assume you are running 1 keyword (nobody is doing this I hope) and your CPC (Cost Per Click) is $1 to keep it simple. If Google determines that the search volume for your keyword is 1,000 queries per day, with a historical CTR of 10%, you could receive as many as 100 clicks or spend $100. Now assume that your daily budget is $20 a day, or 20 clicks. Google will then show your ad [impression] at an interval of approximately once every 5 searches. There are a lot of other factors involved in reality, but we are keeping things simple for example purposes. Then, based on the actual CTR of YOUR campaign Google will decide how often and when to show your ad in an effort to make sure they spend your entire budget while maximizing their CPC and CTR (since this is how they get paid, and handsomely I might add). Keeping in mind that the goal of search engines is to show the searcher the most relevant results (paid and organic).

That was a simple example based on 1 keyword, now imagine that you are running 20, 50, 100, etc. keywords, using different match types across multiple search partners, you can see how complicated it can get.

So why aren’t your PPC ads showing every time you search your favorite keyword? Realize that the more often you search and don’t click on your ad the less likely you are to see it the next time. So either click on it and spend the money to support your CTR or step away from the keyboard and grab a Fresca. I recommend the latter.

If you’ve got questions or comments about ppc search engine management please contact us or comment below and we’ll be happy to respond.