How To Ensure Google Rankings Are Not Lost While Migrating?

No doubt that Blogger is one of the best tools available in the market to start your blogging career. However, more sooner than later, many people start realizing that to have more control over their blogs and statistics, they will need to use the service which can be self hosted. This is the reason why they want to migrate to WordPress. While migrating, one of the biggest challenges is to retain the Google rankings. But the good news is that if you are careful and meticulous, you will not use the Google rankings. You can either make use of Blogger to WordPress migration service or you can do it all by yourself.

First Things First

The primary thing that you need to get started is a WordPress hosting service. For this you will need a domain name which is hosted by the WordPress server. There are several website hosting services that will give you access to the WordPress hosting. You may even get some special deals and offers if you are using the WordPress for the first time. First of all you will need to register a domain name with the company. After that you will need to install WordPress on your site.

Importing of Blogger’s Blog to WordPress

You will first need to go to Blogger and locate Tools > Import. You will see a popup which will ask you to get started with blogger importer installation. Once the Blogger importer plugin is downloaded, you will need to activate it, followed by clicking on ‘Run Importer’ link. After that, you will need to get WordPress authorized. The button will lead you to the Google Accounts page. Here, you will be asked to allow WordPress to manage your existing blogger account. You will see that you are getting redirected to WordPress. You will now simply need to hit the ‘import’ button and the blogs will get imported. You will then be asked to assign the author. You can choose from the existing Blogger authors.

Permalink Setup

Importing the blogs from Blogger to WordPress is just the first step. You also need to make sure that you do not lose the Google search rankings. For this you will need to setup the permalinks properly. Thankfully, WordPress has a feature which lets you create the URLs that are SEO friendly. But your objective would be to keep the URL structure as similar as possible to what you had with Blogger. For this, you can go to Settings > Permalink and select the relevant options.

Redirection Setup

The most important part of the migration is to setup redirection so that the users accessing your old website are automatically redirected to the WordPress site. This will ensure that you do not lose any traffic to your blog. You will also want to make the search engines know that your old site has now moved to a new location. Redirection will happen at two levels. On the Blogger site you will need to change the settings so that the users are redirected to the new page. On WordPress you will need to create pages corresponding to the pages from which the visitors have been redirected.