New Domain & 301s with Blogger

Moving to a new domain from a blogger, need help with 301s

[mirabile]

I am moving from a blogger-hosted subdomain (mybrand.blogger.com) to a new, non-blogger domain at www.mybrandnewsite-notonblogger.com.

We'll no longer be using Blogger for the CMS.

I understand Blogger has a tool that will let you 301 redirect a domain. But here is what I can't figure out:

1. Is there any way I could finagle page-by-page redirects from mybrand.blogger.com to www.mybrandnewsite-notonblogger.com?

2. If not, then can I at least be sure that if I use the 301 tool in blogger, that any pages that live under mybrand.blogger.com get 301d to the homepage of www.mybrandnewsite-notonblogger.com?


I've found some examples where people have kept the old blogger domain live, and have used cross-domain rel=canonical tags to point relevance to the new domain, along with meta refresh that redirects users. But meta refreshes seem a little shady, plus the client would prefer that the blogger domain is eventually "gone" because of branding purposes.

I really appreciate any feedback the experts in this forum could offer. Thanks so much.

[lucy24]

You need to find out how the original host's domain redirecting works. From example.com (old) to example.org (new) the two possibilities are:

www.example.com/anyrequestatall >> www.example.org/
(everything redirects to front page of new domain)

www.example.com/anyrequestatall >> www.example.org/anyrequestatall
(file-for-file redirect from old to new domain)

If the old host will only redirect to the front page of the new domain, throwing out the rest of the request, then you'll have to keep the old domain alive for a while.

The minimalist version is to make an htaccess at the old site, containing one line. Well, two:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.org/$1 [R=301,L]

That will grab any incoming request and redirect it, file by file, to the new site. That includes things that you would normally block, or that would be redirected to a different name. Like I said, minimalist version.

The word "blog" suggests that your existing code includes some combination of redirecting and rewriting to make pretty URLs. But that's site-specific, so we would need to know what's currently going on. There will be no rewriting at the old site, but there may be more redirecting, like

www.example.com/longuglyURL >> www.example.org/shortprettyURL

in one step.