How I Moved My Blog - Part 1

I recently moved my blog. I moved it between blogging service providers, and between domains. This turned out to be a fair amount of work and decision-making. I thought that other people who are considering a similar transition might benefit from seeing how I dealt with it.

I considered leaving the old content at the old service and domain, especially because it was at Blogger, which was free. But I had grown dissatisfied over the years with Blogger's available templates, and have never been super happy with their composition tools.  And I never really was satisfied with the old domain. It was good enough, but I was always on the lookout for something that really sang to me. And more, I didn't want to split up my blogging history over such an arbitrary line in the sand.

Moving services can be a pain, but it seems like most modern services and tools can handle exporting and importing, especially from an 800lb gorilla like Blogger. The domain change is a big deal, though, for a couple of factors. Firstly, there are a few people and sites that have linked to me over the years. While I'm no Jeff Atwood, or Rands, I didn't want to "break the web" in even a small way, if I could avoid it. Secondly, you can really screw yourself by way of the search engines, if you're not careful in how you copy or move content.

I ruled out just duplicating the content fairly early on. For starters, I didn't want to split my traffic. (Also a reason not to just leave the old stuff where it was and post only new stuff to the new domain.) It would dilute search rankings, and it would give anyone who ends up at the old domain a potential dead end that might cause them never to find my new stuff. And most importantly, if you just duplicate the content, you're all but sure to get one or the other domain flagged as a content-scraper and de-listed from the search engines.

So that left moving. Fortunately Squarespace has a convenient tool that scrapes posts and comments from Blogger's RSS feeds, cleans it up, and plops it right into a fresh Squarespace blog. So that grunt work was dealt with.

The next step was figuring out how to move it without suffering undesired consequences. How do I move the content without breaking people's old links or destroying my "Google Juice"?