How to Move a Blogger Blog to Your Own Domain

Hello learn how to Move a Blogger Blog to Your Own Domain !!

Google's recent move to redirect blogspot.com to country specific sub domains helped me solidify my decision to the extent of finally moving. I made a lot of other changes as well and have listed as much of them as possible as they might help some of you who are also planning to make the move. I have listed them in the order in which I made them.
Follow these simple steps,

1) Changed my domain's settings to hide personal information from being displayed in the who is database.

2) Modified my domain's CNAME and A records to correctly point to Google's servers. Check this page from Blogger for details regarding this step.

3) Generally, it takes some time for your domain registrar to completely update the settings mentioned above. So, if you immediately point your new domain to your blog, users will see a 404 error. To avoid this.

4) When my domain correctly started loading the temporary blog, I modified this blog's settings to link it to the new domain. Now my new domain was correctly loading my blog. While doing this, I made sure to select redirecting the non www version to the www one.


5) Downloaded my blog's template and opened the downloaded XML file in Wordpad. I then used Wordpad's Find and Replace function to replace each occurrence of tweakandtrick.blogspot.com with www.tweakandtrick.com and uploaded the modified template. This automatically changed all navigational links to use the new domain.

6) Some widgets still had links pointing to the blogspot subdomain. I changed them manually.

7) Went to Google Webmaster Tools, added my new domain and submitted the full sitemap. Normal Blogger feeds show only 20 URLs, so in order to submit all the URLs, I submitted a custom queried feed that includes 500 URLs.

Normal Feed: /atom.xml

Feed I Submitted: /atom.xml?redirect=false&orderby=updated&max-results=500

8) Bing also brings considerable amount of traffic to this blog. So, I added the new domain to Bing Webmaster Tools and submitted the same sitemap.

9) Blogspot uses 301 permanent redirects to redirect visitors to new domains. This should have normally allowed Google to immediately index my new blog's URLs but it did not. So, I resubmitted my old blog's complete sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools. As the Blogspot blog had some authority in Google, GWT quickly processed the sitemap and immediately noticed that all those posts had moved to the new domain. This notified Google to index my content under the new domain and after almost 12 hours, my old blogspot URL's started getting replaced by the new ones.


10) After making the move, my search traffic is way lower than normal. This should change and traffic should return to normal once search engines completely transfer my Blogspot subdomain's trust and authority to this new one.

Some other changes I made

1) Used Feedburner's MyBrand feature to transfer my FeedBurner feed.

2) Modified my social profiles to link to my new domain.

Some Noticeable Benefits
It is too early to say this but ever since I moved to my own domain, the subscription rate has gone up considerably. It has also increased the percentage of users who are completing the subscription process.

Any problem, suggestion, feedback don't hesitate to Contact Me !!

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Sasidharan Muthusamy

Hi. I’m Designer of Smart Technology. I’m CEO/Founder of Techspotz. I’m Creative Art Director, Web Designer, UI/UX Designer, Interaction Designer, Industrial Designer, Web Developer, Business Enthusiast, StartUp Enthusiast, Speaker, Writer and Photographer. Inspired to make things looks better.

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