Heya Folks,
Well shifting or moving your blog from one domain to another is not easy task but with the continous upgradation on wordpress‘s core install the things are also not that difficult. The built-in import export feature in wordpress is the real saviour in this process. Follow the steps below and you should be good.
1) After setting up your domain on the hosting service, create a file robots.txt and type in the following lines.
User-agent: * Disallow: / |
This will disallow search engines to crawl your new domain, until you setup the new domain of yours.
2) Now goto the old blog and in the admin panel, click on “Export” under the Tools menu. It will ask if you want to export for a certain author or no. This is basically useful in multi-user blog. Choose as required and hit “Download export file”
3) Now lets login into new blog and under the same tools menu inside Admin panel, click import. Now supply the downloaded file and click import.
4) After this you will be asked if you want to download the files associated or no, its recommended to check the option, especially if you do not want the old domain to continue.
5) Now you have all the data and configuration ready, lets install all the plugins same as the old blog, I would simply copy the plugins folder on the new blog install folder. Some plugins might ask you API keys or other configuration and that can be sorted out easily using the Admin panel.
6) Install the plugin Search and Replace this will help you remove the traces of your old domain and replace it with the new one, probably you wanna do it for the links and all.
7) Now the final step, redirecting the old users, search engine crawlers, bots, so as to retain the SEO juice of your old website and pass on to the new domain. Two simple lines (typed below) in the .htaccess does the trick.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*old_domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new_domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] |
8 ) Finally submit the new domain or blog to various search engines, and list it in the directories. Publish feeds using feedburner , add it to google webmasters tools, Google Site Analytics, Yahoo Site Explorer and that should be all for the quick startup. Later on you can keep on adding stuff.
9) Another suggestion is to remove your old blog’s content because search engines crawlers add weird with the duplicate content, I do understand the concept of canonical but still I dont wanna take the risk 😛
Hope this helps.
Cheers!!
Realin !
