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Changing Your Blog URL? Plan the Change!

Occasionally, after you have your blog for a while, you tire of the URL. Maybe the blog content changed in focus, or maybe you discovered that the current URL is too similar to another better known one. So you decided to pick a different BlogSpot address. Whatever.

So you selected an available URL, went into Settings - Publishing, changed the address, and republished to the new address. Fine.

Then you discovered that you can still see the old URL. Not so fine.

What you did was similar in effect to someone switching to external publishing. Like someone who switched to external publishing, you can still see the old blog. Hopefully, it still has your contents there.

At one time, if you switched your blog address, or changed to external publishing, and looked back later, you'd likely find a splog sitting at your old URL.

If you gave up your mature and valuable URL, a spammer would take it.

When you gave up the URL, a spammer found out about it, and started publishing there. Splogs are designed to exploit that mistake.

Blogger Engineering tries - not always successfully - to block spammers.

But Blogger Support got tired of folks complaining about the splogs, so they fixed it so URLs that were abandoned, either from deletion or from publishing to a different address, wouldn't be available.

So now it looks like you have to contact Blogger Support, and explain the problem. And don't forget to reply to the botmail.

And in the future, if you change or delete your blog, plan the change properly. Put a stub blog in its place. But do this carefully.

Use a carefully planned script - written before you start.

Follow this procedure for migrating your blog to a new URL. Think about each step first, and do them in sequence.
  1. Backup your current blog, as it is now in Blogspot.com.
  2. Backup the template, into a text file. Save the backup file in several places.
  3. Change the Blogger settings, on your current blog, to publish to the new URL.
  4. Change the Blogger settings, on your stub blog, to publish to your current URL.
  5. Use a well planned script - and carefully swap URLs.

If I was doing this, I would do all steps at the same time, one after the other. I would probably not take a rest break, and I certainly wouldn't let the sun go down, before completing the last step. Seriously. Read Spam Blogs #3, if you don't understand how frustrating it will be for you to have to have your vacated blogspot address used for a splog.

Comments

Daniel Drost said…
I updated my blog to blogspot without realizing that I would not still be using my old html. How do I correct this mistake?
Nitecruzr said…
If HTML is a problem, then you're talking about having upgraded to a Layouts template. That's easy to recover from - revert to a Classic template.
The Boarder said…
I didn't realize there were so many steps to changing the blog address, so I simply changed the URL. Is there any way to now reclaim that URL and stub it to the new one? I had a few high google search hits that are now worthless, and I would enjoy them being redirected to the new blog...
Nitecruzr said…
Hey Boarder,

If the old URL is still available, just setup a stub blog and publish to that URL.

If the old URL isn't available, was it taken by a splogger? If so, then report the splog. If it's a legit blog that is published there, you're out of luck.

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