If you’ve decided to try blogging with Blogger, Google’s free blog hosting service, the day may come when you want to move up, say from Blogger to WordPress. (WordPress has a utility that will move your Blogger pages to your WordPress blog.)
For example, maybe you started your blog on Blogger, just to dip your toe in the water. But now you want more features that Blogger has to offer, and you’re willing to spend a little money to do that. You might realize one day that you really want categories, which Blogger doesn’t have. Categories help readers find posts by grouping them according to some topic name, and they also help search engines decide what your blog is about.
There’s a problem with moving your blog to a new platform, because, just like moving your home, your address will change. Therefore, links from other blogs or sites won’t work. They’ll either be pointing to someplace that doesn’t exist, or to a page that says “This blog has moved to….” If you’re a relatively new blogger and don’t have a lot of links from other blogs, this won’t be much of a problem, but if you’ve been networking like mad, it will be. Inbound links, as these are called, are one of the factors that goes into how easy you are to find via a search engine. One tip to avoid this problem altogether is to get your own domain name as soon as possible, and stick to that.
Web addresses on Blogger are all of the format “yournamehere.blogspot.com.” If you move away from Blogger, your blog site — the collection of web pages and other files that make your blog look and work the way it does — will be somewhere else.
And you’ll have a new web address. For example, instead of being “http://ctbizblogs.blogspot.com” you’ll be “http://www.ctbizblogs.com.”
To get around that, you can get your own domain name, such as www.ctbizblogs.com, for a nominal fee. Once you do, you can have that domain name point to your Blogger blog, so that people typing “www.yournamehere.com” in their browser will go to http://yournamehere.blogspot.com. Then in the future, when you do decide to move your blog site, you can take the steps that will point www.yournamehere.com to the new website. (See this article on moving to a new web host for more details.) Then, as long as you don’t change your domain name, links from other websites will work.
![email address: ctbizblogs [at] gmail.com](http://www.ctbizblogs.com/wp-images/email.png)
October 21st, 2005 at 7:44 am
[…] I’ve been focusing lately on more technical issues, such as domain names and ways to subscribe to blogs you want to read. […]
December 7th, 2005 at 7:40 am
[…] It’s very easy to get a blog; you simply go to www.wordpress.com (as opposed to the .org domain for the version you can host yourself). There, you enter a name for your blog, which becomes the first part of the URL – in my case, it’s (what else) http://ctbizblogs.wordpress.com. (For my views on having your domain name, see this article.) […]