Panda started to love my site in the midst of restructuring plans

[Oxydada]

My English is not perfect, but I'll try to explain:

I have a blog hosted on Blogger, with its own domain. I was just planning to finallty move it to self hosted Wordpress and was tweaking a theme, changing permalinks, etc - about to go live and make the switch.

And then, the international Panda version hit a bunch of my sites, and this one in particular got A LOT of love from Google - while still being hosted on Blogger - meaning traffic increased around 50% and revenue is better than ever because of that.

Now I'm really scared to move it or even touch it and make Panda change its mind.

Everything is waiting in my VPS: a brand new IP, theme and better (new) permalink structure (Blogger sucks at that). Content will stay untouched.

Should I make the move? In the past, when I migrated sites from Blogger to Wordpress using this "same system", nothing happened, everything stayed normal... But now, there's Panda and its cyclotimic moods! I have read so many stories and theories about Panda, that now I'm terrified of making changes.

Any advice?

Thanks in advance.

[leadegroot]

If this is a money site I would leave it for the moment - another 12 months may see us all much clearer on what Panda will hit and what it won't.
If its not a money site, I'd make the switch purely to see if its affected! :)

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Since when is it a good idea to let Google dictate how and where you host your site?

[koan]

Since a change in url structure may negatively impact traffic referral coming from Google and it's making him sweet sweet monies. I totally understand the hesitancy.

[tedster]

Wait a minute - the site is "hosted on Blogger, with its own domain." You can do the same on Wordpress, using your own domain name. So it's not the hosting part that's problematic, it's the new permalink structure and the new theme that are potentially a problem, right?

[lucy24]

Isn't there a recent thread somewhere nearby that discusses whether Google does or does not care what a domain's IP is? Something tells me "IP" would not be a productive search term.

What exactly does "theme" mean? I have to assume you mean something more than fonts and colors. At some point a change in theme crosses over to become a change in content, even if every page contains the same words as before.

[Oxydada]

>>So it's not the hosting part that's problematic, it's the new permalink structure and the new theme that are potentially a problem, right?

Exactly. Permalinks will change from domain.com/2009/11/post.html to domain.com/post Everything will be properly redirected.

Theme = template, sorry. This new template will be better optimized (SEO and user design).

I think what Google is loving is the content, I find it difficult to believe that site optimization is currently being a factor considering that Blogger is hard to optimize for SEO - so if I move it, content will be the same so everything *should* stay the same... but lately Google is being a little bit confusing (or should I say, Panda theories I read are).

>> Since a change in url structure may negatively impact traffic referral coming from Google and it's making him sweet sweet monies. I totally understand the hesitancy.

Sweet monies indeed! (I'm a girl, by the way).
Definitely revenue it's the main factor that is stopping me from moving, that and the fact that 95% of my traffic comes from Google.
At the same time, curiosity is killing me :) what if I move it and thing improve a lot more? Ahhh!

[chrisv1963]

I have a blog hosted on Blogger

Panda loves Google properties and websites hosted on Google properties ...

[ascensions]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.