Moving Blogspot to Wordpress, can I reuse the framed redirect domain without losing SEO?

Question

I have a blogger site (let's call it test.blogspot.com.au) and a domain test.com which redirects to that site.

We've installed Wordpress in a subdirectory on another site and migrated using blogger’s import tool. Let's call it newsite.com.au/blog.

My question is: All the guides seem to relate to editing blogger’s template to redirect to the new site with JavaScript. This implies I need to keep test.com tied to test.blogspot.com.au because various links around the web will be using it.

Is there a way to reuse test.com so it points directly to the subdirectory (and mask the fact that it's a subdirectory) without losing search rank/history, or do I need to get a new domain name to avoid this? I’m happy to accept the fact that we may be getting occasional broken inbound links and let the users deal with it as long as it doesn’t destroy our search rankings.

The new location is shared hosting with cPanel so I can edit .htaccess etc… but there are some limits to what can be done.

Edit: I thought I would share what I did in case it helps anyone else.

At the moment, searches for 'blogname' are returning the new blog, and 'blogname blogspot' are not returning the old blogspot site. So it appears to be working, but I'm not sure whether or not we lost any ranking data in the process.

I did it by editing the blogspot template with these 2 tags in the head:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.newsite.com.au/" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.newsite.com.au/" />

This was done by reverting to the classic template (be careful to remove the mobile template too) and editing it. There are various guides on the web.

For direct post links, you add something similar:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.newsite.com.au/blogger/?q=http://www.newsite.com.au/2014/04/mypost.html" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.newsite.com.au/blogger/?q=http://www.newsite.com.au/2014/04/mypost.html">

Here /blogger/ is a Wordpress template PHP file that interprets the URL and redirects to the migrated page on the new site. With a bit of searching it should be possible to find a guide for this, I do not have the links handy but it was relatively simple to setup based on a guide after using the blogger migration tool.

Answer 1

A frame redirect may hide the real URL from many users, but it won't hide it from search engines. If test.com was a framed redirect for test.blogspot.com.au then Google will index the blogspot site (not the test.com site) and direct users to blogspot directly.

Given that, it is safe to stop pointing test.com at blogspot. You can safely point it to the subdirectory of your new site. When you do so, Google will find that subdirectory and start directing users directly there.

You still need to redirect users that land on blogspot. The javascript redirect may be the only option from blogspot. It is not ideal from an SEO perspective. A 301 redirect would be better. You may lose quite a bit of your SEO traffic if you can't use 301 redirects. The redirect should point to subdirectory of the other site NOT to test.com.

Using framed redirects is not a very effective way of showing your content on a domain name. If I were you, I would suggest finding a host that would allow you to associate the domain name directly with your blog and allow you to serve the content directly on your domain name.

Answer 2

If you use a framed re-direct on Blogger, expect it to be deleted as likely spam.

Instead, as soon as you have test.com pointing to the new place (and assuming you've set up the URLs to mimic the Blogger ones), then delete all your posts and set up a custom re-direct message telling people who does happen to come to the blogspot site what your new address is.