Moving from Blogger to WordPress

This has been an interesting transition, I have to say. I never really intended to 'blog' over at Blogger for a year and half, and in fact I had plans to switch over to WordPress over a year ago... but here we are, a week into the move.

So what can I say? I'm slow 😆

I'm finding that I LOVE WordPress and all that it offers. I like the look and feel better, all of the options that are available - from plugins to themes, and I like the control. You've probably noticed I'm blogging more lately. I'm really enjoying it here!

Speaking of which, someone asked me recently:

Lynn, I noticed that you had a PageRank 3 at your new blog when you launched it. How did you accomplish that so quickly?

I knew that I was going to launch a website on this domain in the near future, and so while I was working on other projects I went ahead and set up a "temporary site" on the domain so that it could become "established".

In the meantime, I went on about my other work and left that to 'do it's thing'. I actually just put a basic WordPress blog on the domain, and used it as an Article Directory. I didnt promote it heavily, but pointed a few links to it - enough so that it achieved some TBPR (toolbar pagerank) by the time I was ready to use the domain.

This is a tip I've shared before. If you are working on a website behind the scenes, it makes sense to go ahead and point the domain to a "placeholder page". I prefer to put an email notification option on that page, so people can sign up to be notified when the site goes live, but you can do with it what makes the most sense for your particular project.

If you get a few links pointing to this "placeholder page", then your domain can begin to "get established" in the major search engines, and you will be several steps ahead of the game when you launch your actual website.

Anyway- Moving right along...

When I decided to move from Blogger to WordPress, I had two options. I could start fresh, or I could import all of my content here to the new WordPress platform. I actually put quite a bit of thought into that... and I decided NOT to import my old posts into this new blog.

For starters, my original blog had a PageRank 5 on the main page and almost 19 months worth of content. Many of the internal pages also had PageRank, and were already established in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Not to mention the thousands of inbound links pointing to that "site"...

Why mess with all of that?! 😯

I decided that I would let all of those pages continue to "do their job", and that I would let them keep their place in the rankings at the major search engines. Removing them (or even trying to move them, and keep everything redirected) seemed almost silly.

Just as a (really bad) example... go to Google and search "sushi smiley" (without quotes). Currently, one of my blog posts is #1 for that phrase. If you click through, you'll see that page on my old blog has PageRank... and highly relevant Adsense ads (which I just added last week). How about if someone is searching for an alternative to articleannouncer, or even a search for "I want to learn Affiliate Marketing" (without quotes) - one of my old blog posts ranks #3 in that search.

Again, why mess with all of that... right? Right! 😉

What I did do is this:

• I added Google Adsense to the top and bottom of all of the pages on my Blogger blog. There are hundreds of pages and many hours of my work over there... so I wanted to at least 'monetize it'.
• I updated the Feed Broadcaster (email notification powered by Aweber) so that everyone who was subscribed to my blog originally would begin receiving email updates from posts at the new blog. (And I accidentally set off a flurry of emails all at once when I did that - Oops! - so sorry about that to all of you that are subscribed! LOL)
• I posted entries along the way to keep everyone posted on the progress of the move to WordPress and the new domain (here at ClickNewz.com). I encouraged people to update their bookmarks, links & Feed URLs if using a Feed Reader (you can see that post here).
• I added stickers (I think they are called "chicklets"?) to the old blog, which would subscribe people to the NEW feed here at ClickNewz.com. That way if someone happened on an older post at the Blogger pages, and subscribed, they would be subscribing to the current posts.
•  I updated the Headline Burner in my forum Sigs so that it reflected posts here at the new blog. This is an animated graphic that shows my 5 most recent posts, which is a great blog-promotion tool! (you get all this cool stuff from FeedBurner by the way - free)

I also added the email notification form and subscribe stickers here at the new blog, too. You'll see them over to the right. So if you arent subscribed to receive email updates yet... well, now you have no excuse 😉

Next, I set out to update the sitewide links from my primary website. Thank goodness for SSI (LOL)! SSI is "Server Side Includes" and it means that I only had to edit ONE file, instead of editing the navigation links on EVERY page of my website.

I shudder to think just how many pages that might have been 😆

I stopped there and put some thought into that. I wasnt sure if I wanted to link directly here... or not. That might seem like a silly thing to debate, but let me explain my thought process:

Hundreds and hundreds of site-wide links are not all that valuable. Not any more valuable than a few good quality links - and certainly way less valuable than hundreds and hundreds of inbound links from different domains.

I decided to update all of my site-wide links to point to an internal page on my website. Here is the result: http://www.selfstartersweeklytips.com/blog/ . As you can see it links to this blog, offers the email notification option, and shows the last 10 posts right there on the page.

I even called my good friend, Roy Montero (SEO Specialist) and he confirmed that this was a good move. He offers a one-hour free consultation, by the way, so if you have SEO questions or want to do some SEO/Blog brainstorming... get in touch with him!

I am still on the hunt for a script that will parse the RSS Feed into HTML (currently using Java) so that the content on that page will be "search engine friendly" and will become a dynamically updated page. If you know of one that works well, clue me in 😉

In the long run, I think that was the better linking strategy. I optimized that page for "Marketing Blog" and I optimized the main page of the actual ClickNewz blog for "Internet Marketing Blog". I'll keep you posted as to how that works out in the long run...

So far so good! I think the transition has gone well up to this point, and I believe that things are moving in a great direction. I do have a few things left on my task list, which are: 

• I need the hack for removing the "no follow" tag from comments. I would like for my readers to benefit from their participation here!
• I would like to fix it so that the comments link shows on the main page. Currently you have to click through to the actual post to see the comments.
• I'm still unsure how many posts I should show on the main page of the blog. I'm finding that 10 is entirely too many. What has worked for you? Or what do you - as a reader - prefer??

I still have a few minor things to fix, too - such as updating my profile (About Lynn page), my Blog Roll, adding a few new pages, etc. But if you can help on any of the points above, I would kiss your feet! :D