Moving to WordPress
I’ve been blogging at Blogger.com for nearly two years. In general, I’ve enjoyed using Blogger.com. Its template management is easy, and I’ve enjoyed reasonable Google visibility. However, when my friend, Gary Kelly, drew my attentions to the possibilities of WordPress and TypePad, I decided it would be worth giving WP a whirl.
Gary correctly points out that the problem with the free Blogger.com is its spam content has hindered its search engine value. Many pro-blog consumers use ‘-blogspot.com’ to remove spam from their results (click here if you’ve no idea what -search term means).
Moreover, a recent study showed that 75% of Blogspot blogs are spam. If you’ve paid for a domain and hosting, logically, the author is more likely to be publishing with intent. Interestingly, this is a nice little throwback to the offline publishing world, where the high marginal costs of production have acted as a quality filter.
Moving to WordPress couldn’t have been easier. Just choose a hosting company with CPanel and Fantastico. I used BlueHost. Within minutes of registering the domain Baldysblog.com, I had clicked Fantastico and installed WordPress. Minutes later I’d imported all of the blog entries, and comments from Baldyblog.blogspot.com using WordPress’s import tool. I couldn’t be more impressed with BlueHost. For $6.95 per month (£3.50), I can host up to 5 domains, and I can install anything I like from the Fantastico interface. The next evening, I registered a new domain with BlueHost, and assigned WordPress to the new domain (naturalhealthlibrary.org - a new e-zine traffic generator for HealthSpark).
WordPress as a blogging tool is infinitely better than Blogger.com. Not least because the WYSIWYG works so well on Safari and Firefox. Frankly the Mac support on Blogger.com is embarrassing. But for me the real winner on WordPress is Brian Gardner. Brian Gardner’s WordPress themes transform WP from a blogging tool to a seriously powerful web content engine. His templates are extremely versatile, and as naturalhealthlibrary.org demonstrates, very effective tools for content propagation and SEO visibility.
The SEO value of WP is self-evident. Take a look at the category listings in the right-hand side-bar, and then look at the tag system. Plus, WP produces really precise and relevant page titles. I’ve already seen a significant increase in traffic following the move. However, the Blogger.com legacy has left me with a few problems that I’ve only partially solved.
First off, if you do the move to WP you’ll be stuck with duplicate content in the old blog. Ideally, you don’t want to delete the old blog because of all the inbound linking. Also, the WP import routine doesn’t import images, it just maps to the old images at your old blogger.com site.
I’ve removed the front page content to a new blog advertising the move to Baldysblog.com, and I’ve truncated recent posts. Ideally, I should truncate all posts, and move all images to the new domain. Anyone who can do this programatically, will earn their place in OS heaven.
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