Export / Import Requires Administrative Control Of Both Blogs

Occasionally, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I?, we see the naive query

How do I merge my two blogs, using Export / Import?

When given the simple advice

Use the "Export blog" and "Import blog" wizards, both in the dashboard Settings - Other menu.

the immediate response is

I don't have that menu item!

This person has, most likely, lost control of the Blogger account.

In order to avoid encouraging scraping of blog contents, both the Export and Import wizards are only available to blog administrators. Not everybody wishing to use "Export blog" has blog ownership, however.

Too many people, denied immediate recovery of control of their blog, just start another blog.

With a new blog, the first thing needed is the content from the old blog. This is not easily had, however - because both "Export blog" and "Import blog" are part of the Blogger dashboard - and can be accessed only by blog owners.

If anybody could use "Export blog", and export the comments and posts from any blog, "Export blog" would be a very popular wizard - to blog thieves. To encourage Export / Import to be used for legitimate purposes, Blogger made it part of the Blogger dashboard - where it is accessible only to blog administrators.

This does not provide a solution for people who have lost control of their Blogger accounts - and who naively figure to start a new blog, and move the contents of the old blog to the new blog. If you're in this situation, you have only two possibilities.

1. Recover comments and posts using blog feeds and online cache.
2. Cluster the new and old blogs - but asymmetrically.

You can link from the new blog back to the old blog, using any combination of imaginative techniques - but without control of the old Blogger account, you're simply not going to be able to link from the old blog to the new blog.

Sorry. Once again, you have to always retain control of your Blogger account.

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Blogger Blogs Cannot Be Used As Gateways

We see evidence of confusion, from time to time, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I?.

How do I move an established blog to WordPress (or any other platform), while retaining the history, reader interest, search engine reputation?

Some blog owners think blog readers are cattle (to be herded from blog to blog) - or monkeys (to be attracted by shiny things).

We've known for some time, that Blogger blogs cannot be used as gateways, with traffic automatically redirected from one blog to another - or from a blog to a non Google website. Use of traffic redirection scripts is a known cause of blogs classified as malware hosts.

If you wish to relocate a Blogger blog in another hosting service, you can always publish your Blogger blog, and a non Google blog / website, as dual hosts, in a non BlogSpot domain.

With your Blogger blog and non Blogger website published to the same domain, you can then combine the two, dynamically. Just remember to add unique content to each, periodically, to retain search engine reputation.

1. Publish your Blogger blog to a host in your custom domain.
2. Publish your WordPress (or any other platform) blog to a host in your custom domain.
3. Combine the two blogs.
4. Let your readers access either blog, as their choice.
5. Update both blogs, to retain search engine reputation, regularly.
6. When the WordPress (or any other platform) blog receives enough reputation and traffic, make the Blogger blog into a stub blog.

Just don't build a maze of blogs and web sites - and don't waste time or money artificially developing traffic. Blogger blog readers are attracted by interesting and useful content - and are retained by new content, added periodically.

And don't try adding clever code, to shuffle your readers from one blog to another.

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Redirecting The Traffic From Your Blogger Blog

Some Blogger blog owners are confused about their ability to redirect traffic to, or from, their blogs. Sometimes this leads to problems, as in the need to report a problem with spam classification, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken

Why was my blog just deleted, for "Malicious JavaScript"?

Other people will want to know why, after renaming their blog, all the search engine references now point to a dead URL. Still others may want to rename specific posts, and yet have the post URLs match the new titles.

Blog URLs, and Post URLs, are complex details, for Blogger blogs. By default, both are managed for you. Not everybody understands how to manage blog and post URLs, when necessary.

Not every blog owner understands that ones readers are not possessions, to be manipulated at will. Many spammers would love to use various Blogger blogs as gateways, redirecting their readers either to other Blogger blogs, or to non Google controlled websites. In order to discourage spamming activity, neither type of redirect is permitted, by the Blogger spam classifier.

Even if automated redirection was permitted, many redirection techniques may not work for everybody. Modern browsers, designed to prevent abusive activity like hacking and spamming, may have filters which explicitly block DNS settings, and scripts, designed to redirect traffic from one website to another. If you design your URL migration strategy to require automated redirection - and even if Blogger / Google does not delete the blog for abusive technique - you may still not see a consistent transfer of existing traffic, to your new URL.

You can redirect a Blogger blog, to a non BlogSpot URL, using properly setup custom domain publishing - "CNAME" referral. That is the only valid way to redirect a BlogSpot URL, to a non BlogSpot URL. Any other method will eventually leave you posting, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken

Why was my blog just deleted, by Blogger?

If you rename your blog - and publish to a new BlogSpot URL, your only recourse is to publish a "stub" (empty) blog to the old URL, and visually redirect your readers.

This blog is now published as "blogger-status-for-real.blogspot.com". Please update your bookmarks.

You can, if you wish, redirect the blog feed, after renaming the blog - but this should be done only when necessary.

There are several specific cases where the blog feed should not be redirected.

Blogger recently provided us the option to redirect traffic from one blog post to another - but the syntax used by the custom redirects wizard explicitly prevents redirection outside the base blog URL. That said, we have seen some imaginative redirections, between different URLs in the same blog.

Use of the custom redirect feature can generate interesting problems, not all of which can be prevented, easily. You can redirect some URLs - but you need to understand what you can, and cannot do - and why you cannot do everything that you would like.

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