How do I change an existing custom domain with Blogger to a new custom domain

Question

I have a Blogger site which has a custom domain which I want to move one old domain to new. Let's pretend this is old-domain.com and new-domain.com.

I want to:

1. Preserve my search engine ranking as much as possible;

2. If any link to a page has the old custom domain in the URL, and this link is clicked on, it will redirect to a link with the new domain but with the same page. (For example, www.old-domain.com/existing-page.html should redirect to www.new-domain.com/existing-page.html.)

Does anyone know how I would go about this?

I know that if I had access to the .htaccess file for the site, it would be an easy thing to do, but it seems that Blogger does not expose this.

I have heard that using meta refresh is not a good idea if you want to preserve search engine ranking, so that's out.

Blogger provides a UI that lets me add custom redirects, but I would have to do this for the thousands of pages on my site, so this isn't practical (unless there's an API that Blogger provides that lets me add these redirects very quickly).

Answer 1

This is not a Blogger problem:

Your blog always has a blogspot addresss www.yourblog.blogspot.com.

When you publish to a custom domain, Blogger handles the re-direction from www.yourblog.blogspot.com to www.yourcustomdomain.com for you - and every single post/page is redirected correctly.

Now to move from oldcustomdomain.com to www.newcustomdomain.com, you simply tell Blogger to:

1. Stop publishing your blog to www.oldcustomdomain.com and then to
2. Start publishing it to www.newcustomdomain.com

Once you have done this, Blogger handles the re-direction from www.yourblog.blogspot.com to www.newcustomdomain.com for you - and every single post/page is redirected correctly.

And at that point, Blogger has no connection at all with www.oldcustomdomain.com at all: how you manage re-directions from it is totally up to the tools provided by the domain registrar.

The only thing you could possibly to with Blogger is to make a totally new blog (www.mybloghasmoved.blogspot.com), give it one post that says

www.oldcustomdomain.com has moved to www.newcustomdomain.com please update your links

and use the Options > Search > Missing post redirection option to send any traffic to that one post. But this is a long way from what you want to achieve - blogger simply does not have that functionality.

Answer 2

While Blogger does not expose .htaccess, it does allow you to implement redirects to the new location of your blog.

Here is the help page on Google. The summary is that you will need to:

1. Point your DNS records for your domain name to Google's servers
2. In blogger go to Settings | Basic -> Publishing -> add a custom domain -> Switch to advanced settings then enter the URL of your domain name and save it.

At this point, your blog will be hosted by blogger but on its own domain name. Your old Blogspot sub-domain will redirect to your new domain name.

It sounds as if you might also be wanting to move your blog off of Blogger to a different host. If that is the case, you can set it up at a new host at this point and import all of your content. Then you can point your DNS records away from Google. Here are full instructions for somebody that has actually done so: http://www.tweakandtrick.com/2012/02/how-to-move-blogger-blog-to-your-own.html