sebastianx.blogspot.com

In August 2007 I’ve moved my old Blogger outlet to this domain. Here is why. Unfortunately, with the Blogger platform I wasn’t able to redirect both visitors and search engine spiders to the new URLs. So if you landed here because you’ve clicked a link pointing to my old blogspot.com blog, please scroll down and click on the new URL. I apologize for the hassles, and thank you for your visit!
Sebastian

Why I moved this blog from blogspot to its own domain

Well, there were many reasons. The most important reason was that Google’s Blogger team was not willing to remove the nofollow crap in comments. I found a 3rd party hack to remove it in the comment author’s link, but there was no way to dofollow links within the comment itself. I appreciate comments and owe the author the link credits (if I approve the contribution and don’t edit the link out for obvious reasons).

Also, commenting on a Blogger blog is a PITA. The comment script is not part of the blog’s template, and it is plain weird with regard to usability. Blogger tortures commenters with awful long and complex captchas, probably they add one to the captcha’s length monthly. As visitors told me that they don’t comment because of the crappy Blogger scripts, I had to leave.

Finally there are a few technical reasons. The old blog was notoriously slow, and often I wasn’t able to post or approve comments because the admin interface was down. Changing the template was a PITA, and many things I liked to do weren’t possible because there’s no server sided scripting at Blogger.

I hope that this blog provides a better surfing experience. Please don’t hesitate to tell me what you think in the dofollow’ed comments, thank you!

Sebastian

PS: If you’d like to update your links to my blog, here is a tool to find the new URLs. TIA!


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13 Comments to "sebastianx.blogspot.com"

  1. Hello world! on 20 August, 2007  #link

    […] I’m in the process of moving my blog from blogspot to this domain. As long as you see a ToDo List here, I’m not yet ready. Ok, there’s no […]

  2. JLH on 20 August, 2007  #link

    This will be so much better, for you, for us, for the world wide web. Blogger is to blogging as FrontPage is to web design.

    I look forward to reading about how you handle transferring the content in the most search engine friendly way possible. I did it on Blogger about a year ago with a meta refresh set to zero, it seemed to work but was a pain. Transferring those deep links is the hardest.

    Do they have a way to do a 301 now? It’s been a while since I’ve logged into Blogger but I’ve been meaning to for some domain flipping operations. :)>

  3. Sebastian on 20 August, 2007  #link

    Hey John, you found the blog before the launch :) Well, that’s exactly what the crawlers do. At least Googlebot so far, Ask and Yahoo’s Slurp fetched the main page only. Google crawls up to 50 pages daily, not bad for a domain I’ve registered just a few days ago. One of my first steps was to generate an XML sitemap. Then I wrote a redirect script and used that to link from all post at blogspot.com to their new location. These links are up a few days now. Today I’ve linked the old blog’s H1 here. When all engines are familar with the blog’s structure I’ll add a “NOINDEX,FOLLOW” robots meta tag to the blogspot site. That’ll help to avoid dupe issues. When the new blog is completely indexed I’ll do the zero meta refresh redirecting everything to this page to transfer the PageRank too. Shortly after the launch I’ll ask a few nice folks linking to me to change their URLs, at least in the blogrolls. I guess that’ll do the trick, although I’ll lose search engine traffic temporarily.

  4. JLH on 20 August, 2007  #link

    Blasted! You’ve disabled the individual comment links, I can’t see what number I am!

  5. Sebastian on 21 August, 2007  #link

    You’re #208 ;)
    Good observation, thanks! I didn’t disable them, the theme author probably thought they’re useless. Fixed.

  6. JLH on 21 August, 2007  #link

    Kudos on the favicon as well, it’s the little details that distinguish the best from the rest.

    Isn’t there a way to actually do 301’s if you transfer the blogspot domain to a blogspot domain that is self hosted for a while at least?

  7. Sebastian on 21 August, 2007  #link

    That’ll be too much compexity just to replace a zero meta refresh by a 301. When I move the Blogger blog to its own domain and redirect from there to this site, I get a chain of two 301s at least, perhaps even three. I can assure you that a zero meta refresh in combination with a noindex robots tag from any free hosted site counts as 301 and that it will do way better than chained 301 redirects.

    Also, I consider the SEO aspect of the redirect a secondary problem. What I really want is to get my readers from blogspot to this site. Unfortunately that will come with an extra hop (the “moved” links on my blogspot posts) where I can lose visitors, at least until I redirect the old blog to this page. Well, although the script tries to figure out which post the visitor wants to read, in many cases s/he will land here and has to search for the link to the post. Not ideal, but better than bothering readers with my ugly blogspot thingy forever. Routing visitors through two or more pretty slowly performing redirects probably would piss of more visitors.

    I think that caring for traffic first and search engines later on is a good strategy for such a move. However, in other cases where I’ve full control over both the old and the new site I’d do it much differently, that is more smoothly for both visitors and search engines.

  8. Full Disclosure of Paid Links on 21 August, 2007  #link

    […] I’ve moved the blog from blogspot.com to this place, this post makes not much sense anymore. I’ve […]

  9. Welcome back at Sebastian’s Pamphlets! on 22 August, 2007  #link

    […] email addresses intact and working) and started my Blogger exodus. Meanwile I’ve imported the old stuff from sebastianx.blogspot.com, and hopefully I’ve solved all the various issues breaking my layout […]

  10. The technical side of moving a blog from Blogger to WordPress on 27 August, 2007  #link

    […] I had to manage an exodus of Blogger driven posts to this WordPress blog. During the move I learned a few new things, […]

  11. If you free-host your blog flee now! on 29 August, 2007  #link

    […] on a Blogger blog is a nightmare with regard to usability, so you miss out on shitloads of user contributed […]

  12. m1t0s1s on 13 September, 2007  #link

    just disable the captcha altogether, geez.

  13. Sebastian on 14 September, 2007  #link

    Sorry, I can’t handle the amount of comments I’d get without it.

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