If you were like me when I first started online, then the thought of starting up a wordpress blog seemed a bit daunting.

It felt as though there was simply too much of a learning curve to deal with, so better to try something a little easier. That something turned out to be a free Blogger site which I figured could handle all of my blogging needs.

However it quickly became apparent that Blogger was simply not up to the challenge of running a professional blog. So I decided it was time to move on to a hosted Wordpress site instead, though this is where the problems came in.

How to move from blogger to wordpress without losing my precious page rank and alexa ranking?

Well here is how I successfully moved this site over without you even noticing! (admit it, you didn’t notice did you?)

Step 1: Configuring Your Blogger Site

Now if you have been using a domain such as sitename.blogspot.com then you are going to lose all pagerank and traffic if you move everything over to wordpress.

However, if you have it published to your own domain such as sitename.com then it will be easy to transfer without losing your hard earned traffic. So to do this, you should first make sure that you are publishing on your own domain which you can do through your blogger backoffice.

**note: It can take up to 2 months for the search engines to transfer your rank to the new domain, so you should do this a soon as possible. Try searching Google using the operator site:sitename.com to make sure that your site is being indexed.

Step 2: Change the DNS Setting of Your Domain

Once you are satisfied that your domain name is being picked up by Google you can go in and change the DNS settings for your domain. This process is different for each domain registrar so check with your site’s faqs for specific steps.

You are looking to change the settings that say Nameserver. So if your hosting account is with Hostgator for instance, your nameservers would look something like ns1.hostgator.com and ns2.hostgator.com. (DON’T use these unless they are the nameservers given to you in your welcome email!)

Step 3: Add Domain To Your Hosting Account & Download Wordpress

This step is also dependent upon which hosting service you are using, but essentially your are simply adding the domain to your hosting account. Then you will want to install wordpress, and if you are with a hosting service that uses cpanel, this is a quick process through fantastico. Check out my post on installing wordpress for a video tutorial.

Step 4: Configure Permalinks

Once you get into your wordpress backoffice, go to settings: permalinks and select the custom structure.

The add this string: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

Step 5: Import Blogger Posts to Wordpress

Now you can go ahead and import your blogger posts into your brand new wordpress site. From your wordpress backoffice click on tools: import and select blogger from the list of options. Once you grant access to blogger to connect your account you will come back to a page like the one below.

Go ahead and select import next to the correct blog and follow the prompts as it imports all of your posts and comments.

Step 6: Fix Permalink Structure

The last step is to maintain the permalinks from blogger to wordpress. If you’ve noticed the structures are a bit different between the two sites. For example:

blogger: move-from-blogger-to-wordpress-the

wordpress: move-from-blogger-to-wordpress-the-easy-way

Since the whole point in this move is to maintain traffic and page rank, we need to make the permalinks exact in every way. So the easiest way to do that is to install the wp-maintain-blogger-permalinks-1.1.zip plugin.

Once you activate the plugin go to  tools: maintain blogger permalinks and click on the button that says Maintain Blogger Permalinks. That’s all there is to it. If you want to double check that everything worked perfectly then head over to Google and do another search for site:sitename.com and click on one of the links to make sure that everything is going to the new wordpress site.

Step 7: Extra Steps

Now you can go into your appearance settings and install the template of your choice. If you can find a wordpress equivalent to your blogger template then you could possibly create the illusion of having not moved at all.

Also, if you are using feedburner, remember to go into your settings and update your primary feed so that your subscribers get redirected accordingly.

So that’s all there is to it. I hope that this tutorial was helpful and that you enjoy your new wordpress blog!