This past weekend I was helping a friend migrate off Blogger (on Blogspot.com) to WordPress on his own domain. I’ve done this with a number of blogs in the past and was shocked to see what’s happened lately.

It used to be that the first step was to publish the blog on your own domain via FTP. Blogger used to be great about this. You’d change your setting to publish via FTP and then they’d do 301 (permanent) redirects from the page on your blog on blogspot.com to the corresponding page on your own domain. That’s how it should work.

But apparently spammers abused the system and set up a 100,000+ blogs and then switched them to things like pharmacy sites so blogger now pops up a warning that looks like this when you hit a blogspot.com URL that has been moved to another domain:

Yes, it really looks that bad - they didn’t even manage to get the graphics working properly. But beyond that, there are no 301 redirects. It’s really a huge disaster for anyone wanting to get off blogspot.com.

So, what do you do if you want to get off blogspot.com to your own domain? If you want to stay with Blogger as your blogging software, you’ll need to endure that horrid warning. But how many of your readers will actually click through to your new site?

Instead, you’ll really need to migrate to something like WordPress to get things on your new domain running smoothly. But it’s not nearly as smooth a process as it used to be…

Here’s the bad part… It’s still really easy to use Blogger to spam - they didn’t fix anything - they just made it worse for people who aren’t spamming. The technique I’m about to show you does just about everything the spammers want to accomplish, but it’s only an adequate solution for the average person.

The basic idea is that you put a Javascript on your page that when the page is loaded, checks to see if you’re on your domain or on blogspot.com. If it’s on blogspot it does a Javascript redirect to your domain. If it’s on your domain, it does nothing… Here’s what the Javascript would look like:

<script language="javascript">
if(top.location.href.substring(0,27) == 'http://myblog.blogspot.com/') {
top.location.href = 'http://www.myblog.com/blog/'+top.location.href.substring(27);
}
else if(top.location.href.substring(0,31) == 'http://www.myblog.blogspot.com/') {
top.location.href = 'http://www.myblog.com/blog/'+top.location.href.substring(31);
}
</script>

If you adapt that code for your own use you’ll need to change the bit where I reference the numbers 27 and 31 (each is referenced twice). There are 27 characters in ‘http://myblog.blogspot.com/’, and 31 in ‘http://www.myblog.blogspot.com/’ - count the numbers in your case and use those (I was too lazy to write a more generic routine).

Now, that’s all the spammers really need to do to get people redirected to their spammy sites. True there’s no PageRank flowing to their site, but Blogger could have accomplished that with 302 redirects instead of 301 redirects.

Now the big problem with doing what I just mentioned is moving your feed. The issue with what I’ve spec’d out above is that the feed won’t get redirected since you can’t insert the Javascript in it. Since you’ll be needing to migrate to a different blogging platform, I doubt you can even effectively use the tool to have FeedBurner host your feed instead of Blogger. It might work, but I haven’t tried it. You’d have to tell FeedBurner to host the Blogger feed and then tell FeedBurner the feed should actually be pulled from somewhere else. Something tells me they’ve got that angle covered, but it’s worth a try…

That’s how you get off blogspot.com. Of course, then you need something to catch the redirected traffic when it comes to your domain. I’ll cover migration to WordPress in another post.

Tags: Blogger, Blogspot, Feedburner, redirects
Categories: Blogging, Feeds, Spam