Blogger Magic - Redirecting A URL In Your Blog

In 2012, Blogger gave us a suite of useful utilities to control how the search engines see our blogs. This includes the ability to redirect one URL in our blog to another URL in our blog.

The "Custom Redirects" feature is easy to use - but like many Blogger features, not immediately so. Neither its possibilities, nor its limitations, are obvious to everybody.

Custom Redirects, which is part of the dashboard Search Preferences wizard, is not difficult to use.

1. Go to Settings - Search preferences - Custom Redirects, and click on Edit.
2. If you have existing redirects, click on "New redirect".
3. Enter the correct "From" and "To" values.
4. Select "Permanent".
5. Click on "Save".
6. Click on "Save changes".

The possibilities are almost endless, when you reference any valid URL in a given blog. Thanks to the syntax of the "From" and "To" values in the wizard, Custom Redirects will only redirect within the blog itself, and is thus useless to spammers and others who would like to misuse it.

Just take any two URLs within the blog, strip the base URL from each, and enter the results as the "From" and "To" values. Always start "From" and "To" with a "/" (no leading spaces, or non visible control characters!), signifying the root of the URL, follow the above procedure, and you're done.

Click here, for examples of what you can do. Then, use your imagination. Just remember though - the actual URL - and what your readers see in the address window - will not change.

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