301 Redirect Your Old Blogger Blog to New Address

Back in February I decided to change the address of my blog from 911-need-code-help.blogspot.com to salman-w.blogspot.com. Changing the blog address is straightforward; however, I wanted the following to happen after the change:

• Backlinks to the old blog should continue to work
• Visitors attempting to access the old blog should be redirected to the new blog automatically
• Search engine ranking for the old blog should be transferred to the new blog

In short, I needed to redirect old URLs to new ones. Given that Blogger does not have an option to redirect URLs to another blog and mod-rewrite/server-side scripting is not available either; my only option was to use zero second meta refresh tag which is (claimed to be) treated as a 301/permanent redirect by Google. So, here is what I did:

NOTE THAT THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT MOVING FROM ONE BLOGSPOT.COM ADDRESS TO ANOTHER. If you are moving from Blogspot hosting to custom domain, you (probably) don't have to do anything special. If you are moving from one custom domain to another, ask your domain name provider to setup a 301 redirect on the old domain.

Redirecting Your Visitors to Your Preferred Domain

A typical website is configured to serve the same content via two addresses: example.com and www.example.com. This redundancy will increase the chances of someone reaching that website directly; but poses a problem for search engines, and you.

Search engines treat a domain and its subdomains as different websites altogether. This means that content available on example.com and www.example.com will be indexed and ranked separately. Thus, a page from your website could be presented multiple times in search results, but not as high as it could possibly get. Moreover, search engines weigh the importance of a page in terms of the number of backlinks to that page. If websites backlink to YourAwesomeArticle.html in multiple ways (specifically by omitting or including the www prefix), this weight will be distributed between these URLs.

URL Rewriting On IIS/PHP Using PATH_INFO

IIS does not directly support URL rewriting. For this purpose you need extensions such as Helicon Tech ISAPI Rewrite, Ionic's Isapi Rewrite Filter or URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0. Without such extensions, PHP applications that capitalize on URL rewriting may work on IIS with not-so-clean URLs; or may not work at all. Yet some versatile applications can use PATH_INFO style clean URLs when mod_rewrite or its equivalent functionality is not available.

In the following article I will show you how to test and fix your PHP installation to make URLs containing PATH_INFO work as expected.

Change Titles of Blogger Blog for Efficient SEO

After few hours of experimenting with the Blogger template variables, I revised the template for my blog to use the following template code for generating title tags: