Let you change your Blogger post URL from an existing post, it would be similar to a new page on your blog. All the incoming traffic from the old post URL would vanish, instead, it will show up a 404 page error on your blog.
That’s not better for your visitors, blog and also in terms of SEO. The simple solution is to use permanent redirection from the old Blogger post URL to the new post URL. You can find custom redirect settings in your Blogger dashboard. I will discuss it later.
Blogger.com and Redirects
Your Blogger site will have an address ending in blogspot.com by default. If you buy a custom domain for your site, like www.thewayoftheweb.net, then everything will work on your new site as long as the URLs of your posts stay the same.
But if you want to keep your old site, then make sure that it has a URL that does not end with blogspot.com or else it will show duplicate content and you’ll need to delete or redirect it to your new website in order for people to see your post(s).
How To Set Custom Redirects in Blogger?
It may happen when linking to your page by other Bloggers, they make a mistake when selecting your post URL. In return, the referral traffic lands on a “404 not found” page instead of the original page.
You can find all the error pages that your visitors land on 404 not found pages in the “Crawl errors” section inside your Google Webmaster tools.
You can only view the data only if you have verified your blog in Webmaster tools. The solution is the same, just locate the URLs of your 404 error pages, and redirect them to the working post URLs.
Clean up all of your 404 error pages is almost impossible because you have no control over the URLs that other sites use to link to you. If it happens, you may contact the site owner who links to your site, ask for changing the 404 not found link with the other working URL.
There would be so many sites that link to you with “404 error pages” so contacting them are not a proper solution. Instead of contacts, you can use the custom 301 redirect option to get an instant and proper solution.
Let’s see how many types of redirections are allowed in Blogger.
Custom Redirect Settings in Blogger
If you want to redirect a Blogger post to another URL, you can use five types of redirection 300, 301, 302, 303 and 307.
All of them mostly used redirection in 301 and 302. Therefore, Blogger has both types of redirection options. To know more about 301 and 302 redirects, follow the articles.
If you want to know more about all types of redirects you may proceed to read this article.
- 302 Redirect: A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect. If you redirect your pages with 302 redirects, it means you temporarily redirect Blogger post to another URL. Search engines can view it by the HTTP response. In that case, your link juice would not be passed i,e, PageRank and backlinks power. Clearly, it would not be best for SEO.
- 301 Redirect: A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. If you have redirected a page with 301 redirects, the page would be moved permanently. In that case, the link juice would also be passed. Obviously, it is better for SEO. You should always consider 301 permanently redirect when redirecting your old posts to new posts.
Now, here is a simple guide to add custom redirect Blogger post to another URL (or deal with the crawl errors) by redirecting the error pages to the targeted posts.
How to Permanently Redirect Blogger Posts to Another domain?
Let you have a current post whose URL is “www.yoursite.com/2015/05/old-post.html”, now you have edited that URL with “www.yoursite.com/2015/05/new-post.html”.
Here is a way to 301 redirects:
- Go to your Blogger dashboard.
- Select your Blog, and click on “Search preferences” under “Settings”.
- Now, look over the “Errors and redirections” section, and click on “Edit” in “Custom Redirects”.
As mentioned in the above screenshot, type the old post URL in the “From” field or write the post URL that you want to redirect. Make sure, you don’t need to write the root directory of your domain i.e., I have typed “/2015/05/old-post.html”.
In field “To”, type the new post URL or the URL that points to after redirection. Now, make a tick in the checkbox in “Permanent”. It means you are redirecting your post permanently so the link juice would be passed from the old URL to the new one.
- Finally, click on “Save”, and then on “Save changes”.
- You have successfully redirected your posts permanently.
By using custom redirects, you can also remove your crawl errors. Here is how can you find these crawl errors.
How to Remove Crawl Errors by Blogger Custom Redirects?
- Go to your Google Webmaster Tools (Re-brand name is now Google Search Console).
- Select your property.
- Look on the left sidebar, and go to Crawl -> Crawl Errors.
- You can here view the “Not found” pages separated from desktop, smartphone and featured phone. You can easily check the desired URLs point to the not found page. If you find it, you can easily 301 redirect them to the targeted post.
- You can also view where and when Google detected “not found pages” by clicking on them.
Note that the technique is only for the internal pages so you can use the custom redirect option to move your internal pages to another internal page.
If you have purchased a new domain and if you wish to redirect your current blog to the new domain, you will need a technique to redirect to the external pages.
Some bloggers start blogging with a free Blogger platform, but later they switch to WordPress sites with their own domain name.
In that case, they redirect Blogger blog to the new domain in the following way. If you wish to redirect your entire Blogger blog to a new domain, just follow the simple step.
How to Redirect Blogger Blog to another Website Domain?
Here is how to redirect Blogger blog to another domain:
- Go to your Blogger dashboard.
- Select your blog -> Template -> Edit HTML -> Click anywhere in the Blogger source code, and press Ctrl+ F.
search <b:include data=”blog” name=”all-head-content”/>. - Now paste the following line just below to above line.
<meta http-equiv=’refresh’ content=’0;url=http://www.yournewdomain.com’ />
Here the number 0 indicates that how many seconds to wait before redirection to the domain. If you have set 0, it is similar as 301 permanent redirects otherwise it would be 302 or 307 temporarily redirected.
You can redirect your Blogger post to another post URL with JavaScript too by the command “window.location=’http://example.com'”. I would not recommend you to redirect your pages by using the JavaScript method as some browsers may have disabled it, and also most of the search engines would not follow such redirects.
Redirect a Blogger post to External URL
First, I have to use the conditional code of Blogger to select a particular page or post, once we select the page that we want to redirect, we will apply meta code to redirect.
Don’t think so much, Just copy the below code and paste it just below to <b:include data=”blog” name=”all-head-content”/> code inside your Blogger source code.
<b:if cond=’data:blog.url == "Your-Blog-Post-URL-HERE"’>
<meta http-equiv=’refresh’ content=’0;url=External-Post-URL-HERE’ />
</b:if>
Change your blog post URL and the external post URL in the above code, and save the template. Now, go to the post that you have redirected, you will see once it loads, redirected to the external domain post page. If you have any doubt you may feel free to contact us.
Conclusion: Custom Redirect Blogger Blog to Another Domain?
Blogger team has given us a great feature as custom redirects by which we can redirect our internal pages to any other internal pages. We can also improve our blog’s user interface by improving 404 not found pages.
I have explained it in the detail, but if you have any doubt you may ask by the comment.
