Blogspot Users Can Switch to Personal Web Domains Without Losing Google Juice

Hey Amit -

I would love to do this but it makes me nervous. Do you know anyone that has successfully done it?

I already have the dumblittleman.com domain, I have just procrastinated moving it to Wordpress and hosting everything myself. This would obviously alleviate that need, but nevertheless, I don't want to be a guinea pig.

I love this feature but I have to think about WordPress to help me out because blogger does not support Subdirectories for this feature. More over WordPress is attracting me a lot with its feature and extensibility.

I'd be curious to know if this would work with the "Personalized Domains" that one can get via MobileOX.com? I'd be very appreciative if you could specify either way. THANX!!!

Hosting on subdomains ! Thats really a good move. Now I can switch to blog.mydomain.com !

This is some awesome information Amit, I have had asked similar question before to some of my friends, but it was not possible that time.. Good you brought this post up. Very useful information.

Well...whoever does it first...let us know. I am pretty curious myself, but as some you have said...no guinea pig here either!

Thanks Amit for the info!

Does this mean the PageRank of my new domain will also jump to the one that is presently held by my blogspot blog?

Google Hint: If you want to publish to an external FTP server, you will need to Set 'Blog Readers' to 'Anybody' and use a Classic Template.

Does it mean that the template I am using(downloaded) can not be used??

This is bigtime. I feel it will make a terrific combo with domain specific mail via Google Apps. Not tried though, just thinking aloud.I tried to do so with my alumni blog on Wordpress (www.imtalumni.com) and ran into instant problems mail on Googla Apps.

This is a good reason for domain sales to accelerate this year.

I hope they merge this with Google Apps for your domain.

The problem is you cannot use www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com (without www) at the same time :(

why don't you switch your blog to custom domain ?

you have any idea on switching to custom domain name ?


like domain name in digital inspirational

hey if a person already have any domain such as mysite.com can he switch his blog to (blog.mysite.com or mysite.com/blog)

If this can be done we can have subdirectories for other things also such as (mysite.com/products, etc.)

I guess Google is trying to ease out some of the problems that come with the new blogger.

ftp publishers do not have the luxury of dynamically generated pages. This is a major annoyance with labels. If you have a label with 100 posts, you will end up with a page several megabytes large. So ftp publishers need to be very weary of using labels. Come to think of it, labels is the one and only big improvement with the new blogger and you have to think hard to be able to use it! May be having your own domain will serve as a middle ground.

I wish blogger could somehow make ftp publishers to enjoy dynamic content. This is difficult but possible, and can be painful, I don't think Google would ever consider such idea.

Ankit, according to the Blogger help page, it will not work with www.mydomain.com/blog.

I tried converting to www.hamelife.com, but it didn't appear towork, and the link I tried back to a post came up with an error page. So there didn't appear to be any redirecting going on. I quickly reverted back to the blogspot seerver again (one easy click, thankfully). So, in a way, I found out something: You could try it, safe in the knowledge that you can revert back if it doesn't work out.

I, too, would be keenly interested in any successful conversions, and what made it possible.

You will however lose your Technorati ranking.

Wordpress.com has this same feature:

engtech.wordpress.com/2006/10

I DO NOT THING THIS IS A GOOD IDEA. YOUR BLOG MAY BE TAGGED AS A SPECIAL KEYWORD AND MAY LOSE IF YOU CHANGE YOUR DOMAIN NAME.

@Amit,

Can we point subdomains? Like we have our domain 'www.ourdomainname.com' which is the homepage. We create subdomain like 'myblog.ourdomainname.com' and can we point this to our BlogSpot?

I was bit confused at the interface and since my webhost support is another junk fellow who does not understand even basics, I am bit confused.

Please help...

Would anyone have a clue whether Blogger would do a 301 redirect ? Also, will this bloggger custom domain have any effect on Adsense income like CPM

By customizing my domain on blogger to match a domain I registered through Google Apps for your domain, will my feeds that I burned on feedburner be impacted?

dude, then why don't grab a domain for you?

@Mark - same here - me as nervous as you are. Not sure what happens to the PR and the Adsense CPM prices ?

@Benedict - Yes, unlike WP, blogger neither supports subcategories nor you can upload HTML pages to Blogger server.. but you can still point the subdirectory to another webserver and get the things done.

@David - Not heard of MobiOX but Blogger Custom Domain should work with probably any web domain as long as the registrar allows DNS changes.

@Anand - Not sure what kind of redirect is that .. if it's a 301, you probably won't loose the search rankings / page ranks.. again this needs to be confirmed.

@Ranjan - As long as you are using Custom Domain, you can use either of the templates.

@Rajesh - suggest you raise this issue in the relevant Google Groups.. the Google staff is actively monitoring that forum.

@Protesto - you can always use Google Webmaster Console for that.

@Juan, Sankar - I might do that but not sure when. DI is still on Old blogger [here's the reason]

@Ankit - you can use a subdomain, not a subdirectory

@Arun - Well said.

@Rory - Do share your experiences when the migration gets over for you.

@engtech - Thanks for sharing your post. Nice and interesting read.

@Vasu - Yes, the blogger help says you can use subdomains like blog.mydomain.com

@Matkowsky - I don't think there would any effect on Feedburner feeds as the XML feeds would still be published at the old address. However, I suggest changing your Feedburner feed to the new url which is abc.com/atom.xml - the change would be transparent to your blog subscribers.

Hi Amit,

Thank you for this post. It was very informative. I tried this and am experiencing what Protesto is saying... i.e. without www, it goes to the parking page.

See my Website. www.ipoweramerica.org goes to blogspot blog, where as ipoweramerica.org is going to my GoDaddy's Default Parking Page :(

Have you tried the www of google's Webmaster console ? I thought that is only to let google know whether or not to use "www" in the search results for the site, not for this kind of stuff...

Let me know ! Thanks.

This interesting. Unfortunately I cant get domains relevant to my current url or my blog title unless I go .org and then have to deal with people typing the .com

I think I've decided against it. It seems like too much of a hassle, especially after some of the comments and experiences on here. I'm going to wait it out and see whether the migration gets smoother for others. Time will tell.

Above all, it would be good if they implemented allowing it to migrate to www.mydomain.com/blog. I'm sure many more would take advantage of it were that the case. But I'm not sure that is possible for them because they need the index.htm.

thanks for posting this topic, Amit. It seems that everyone is still not sure.

Some folks at blogger help group http://groups.google.com/group/blogger-help
have already tried it out and give some comment/complaint there.

And Chuck give some good tips about moving to custom domain here:
http://bloggerstatusforrealbeta.blogspot.com/2007/01/setup-your-google-custom-domain.html

I did is easly with www.badshahs.com. works like a charm

Well, my understanding is that you can move even to a directory and we just did.  Only earlier this week our company moved mynippon.blogspot.com to
www.mynippon.com/blog/ and everything works just fine.

We moved 4 of our blogs from blogspot to our own domain names (custom domain names process blogger calls it) and lost our PageRank 3 status on the two blogs that had pagerank while at blogger. Out of 196 posts in blog.thaipulse.com only 38 are re-indexed! Out of 128 for trythaifood.thaipulse.com only 50 some are indexed. Our pagerank is - grey level indicator which is worse than 0. Not sure what happened, but Google does NOT give you same pagerank all the time, as we are proof. Be very careful! :(P Vern

We did this successfully over a month ago and have run into some difficulties. Our page rank is still a 6, but we are not coming up in Google searches. If we are we are way down on the list. Before the change we had thousands of hits a day just from search engine inquiries. No such luck now, as we only get a couple hundred a day. I have lost 50% of my traffic and my Google AdSense has dropped through the floor.

It sucks. But I am sticking with it in the hopes that things will come back even stronger than before. I added meta tags and resubmitted my site everywhere. Little things like that I hope will help eventually, because I am no pro at this.

I am scared to move my lifeiscolorful blog to a domain, cause of the PR issues. I believe your PR drops once you move from blogspot.com to custom domain. This is most pathetic thing anyone could do, eventually, the SERPs drop as well.

Hey Amit,

Could you confirm if I move to custom domain, by any chance my blogspot blog's original PR would be maintained. I tried to search on it, but could not find satisfactory answer. Thanks!

No you dont retain your Google PR. I have a big fat gray PR button om my new custom domain. And now I wonder how it will affect my search engine rankings now?