Not long ago, I used to have five blogs on Google’s Blogger platform. But, one day I just lost my patience with Blogger because it was not letting me publish my flagship blog on my personalised domain name. I even tried the Blogger Help Group but there too I could not find any positive help.
And so I decided to check WordPress. I got in touch with one of my friends, Payal. She helped me in setting-up a blog on WordPress.com and also in getting it published on my personalised domain name. Then I imported the content of my old blogs hosted on Blogger to the new one that I had created on WordPress. But I didn’t delete my old blogs.
After a few days, while I was browsing through my RSS reader, I chanced upon an article which mentioned about how Google penalises duplicate web content and that in order to get good search ranking one should try to remove duplicate content. I had also noticed that Google continued to give more weightage to my old blogs in the search ranking. And so I decided to delete my old blogs hosted on Blogger platform. But now I realise I should not have deleted my old blogs, at least till I had checked the content that I had imported on my new blog. Here is why!
Recently, while searching for an old post in this blog I just noticed that it was displaying only the first paragraph of the post. At once I felt a choke because the post was a copy from my old blogs. I began wondering if the mishap had happened with just this particular post or with all the entries that I had imported from my Blogger blogs? And so I checked a few random posts and realised that the WordPress had failed to import my blog posts in entirety. I became very irritated but realised I could do hardly anything to make amend.
Now, I can only regret for not inculcating the old lesson which says, ‘Look Before You Leap!’
February 21, 2008 at 8:51 am
It took me a long time to undo the damage I’d done switching from Blogger to WordPress years ago, but it was worth it.
Are your old posts in order? Mine were in reverse chronological order by month (Jan 31 – Jan 1, then Feb28 – Feb 1, etc.), and the post ids started in the 1000’s.
February 21, 2008 at 9:21 am
Thankfully my old posts are in order but that’s just a small consolation
August 31, 2008 at 8:07 am
The same thing happened to me when I transitioned from Blogger to Typepad. When I was ordered to shutdown my TypePad blog, I did not bother at the time to import my posts… of course now my account with TypePad is closed and no chance of getting those old posts back.
I am saddened to hear something similar has happened to you.
October 28, 2008 at 9:33 am
Well written article.