Blogger FTP Migration Tool Walkthrough

Hi I'm Rick Klau one of the product managers and blogger and
I'll be walking you through the migration tool that will help migrate
your FTP blog
over to
Blogger hosting
we announced the tool a few weeks ago
and we've been busy
nailing down a few details to ensure that this is a
fairly smooth process that will
insure that
any blogs you are currently publishing via FTP
will be able to
be updated
after we shut down support for FTP on May 1st
If you log into Blogger starting today
you'll notice an alert at the top of your dashboard indicating
that FTP support is going away
on May 1st
and you'll be invited to start the migration by clicking the Start Migration now link
you also have a link here to the dedicated FTP blog which
presumably many of you have already seen
from recent e-mails that have gone out about this
announcement
so when we clicked start migration
this will take us to we were calling the FTP Migration Dashboard
here you'll see a list of
all of your FTP blogs
in this case I have just one
but if you have others they'll be listed here as well
in the lower left
is a video which will be this video as soon as it's done
and it will be indented there in the lower left. On the right are the headlines
from the FTP blog we have any other announcements to make
clarifications to make
in the coming weeks
they'll be added to the FTP blog and can be linked to from this
migration dashboard
To go ahead click Start
that takes us to the first step in the
migration process
here we see
something that we just recommend in general is good hygiene for any blogger
which is to get a back up
of your blog
in this case
we're going to take a full back up this includes all your posts, your comments
you're template
This is just to ensure that should anything go
wrong at this point (we don't expect it to you but if it does) we have a full back up
to allow us
to recover the blog contents without any data loss
we're going to go ahead and click download blog back up so that we have
that full
XML file
on our hard drive
Click ok
and this will save the final to our
hard drive. Once we've done that
then it's time to continue actually start the migration
So now we're going to
click on continue
that'll take it to step two where we have to pick our
new URL for the blog
Now in this case the migration tool will give you two options
you can either
host your blog at Blogspot
or
you can host your blog
at the domain you're currently hosting your FTP blog at
We assume most of you are going to want to keep your
domain's branding in the URL of the blog
so we're going to walk you through the process of
migrating from an FTP blog to a Blogger Custom Domain
in this case we've already filled in the domain that you're currently hosting at
we selected a
subdomain
we're going to go ahead and click continue
this will take us to the next screen
where we have to verify
that the subdomain is set up properly
and there's a link here
for those of you that need to know
how to set up a CNAME on
your domain
generally a fairly straightforward process just
quick chat with your
domain registrar. We have detailed instructions in our help forum
that walk you through how to do that with most
popular registrars
In my case I had already done this ahead of setting up this migration so that this
video would be a
little bit more streamlined
Because I've done that
DNS has already propagated. Requests for yeoldeftp.rklau.com
the subdomain I've
selected
are already
being pointed to
Google's
servers
So as soon as that the DNS has propagated
you'll see in this box a hosted by blogger
message
that indicates that your DNS is
properly
configured
and that we are seeing requests for your
domain
which means at that point we can continue
If you don't see that right away, it may mean it's taking a few minutes for DNS
to propagate
You can always leave and come back
Just click resume from the migration dashboard to bring it back here
Now we're almost done.
Your new blog URL is already set up,
requests that go to that domain
are already working
your blog is live at that address
but of course you've
been publishing, perhaps for years, to another URL.
You want to make sure that all of the back links
that are pointing to
those old posts
flow through to the new site. You want to make sure that
search traffic --
when people search for terms on posts that you've written --
that those search
queries
result in traffic to the new blog.
And you make sure that anyone who clicks a link to an old post
finds the new URL.
We do two things -- we use something called rel=canonical, simply some code
that's inserted into the HTML of the page
that tells search engines
where the right (or canonical)
page is on the internet. In this case it's the new URLs
are the canonical
locations for your
web pages
And meta=refresh simply redirects
visitors to the older pages (the old FTP pages)
will redirect in the browser
after a few seconds
That insures that they are
transported from the old pages to the new
and get the benefit of
whatever new designs you've set up on the new blog
or whatever new content you posted to the new blog
post migration
This process may take a while but we're doing a full
FTP republish of your blog
and if you don't stick around and sit and watch the
spinners indicate that an FTP is happening
we'll give you the option of checking the box and being e-mailed
when the migration is complete
Check the box, type in your email address
Click start update
and this will kick off a full FTP republish
up your entire blog
which will then
add the code that we just mentioned above
to every page on your blog
insuring that we are protecting
those backlinks, we are preserving that traffic we are preserving
any click traffic from
external web sites
coming through
to your new
blog URL
Now in this case
this isn't a very big blog, this update only takes about twenty seconds
yours of course may take a little bit longer, depending on how big your blog is,
and
how fast the connection to your FTP host is.
As soon as it's done you both get an e-mail and see on the screen
that the FTP republish has completed
We'll click Continue
and that'll take us to the very
last step of this process
which is
checking a few of the old FTP URLs
looking for the code that we inserted
into those pages
to make sure that the redirects are in place
to make sure that the refresh - the meta refresh tags - are inserted
and in place
As soon as we do that we know
that the FTP URLs properly point to your new you URL
which will help insure
that within the next day or two
Google will have indexed
all your new URLs
and that any visitors to the old pages on the FTP blog will
come through
to your new URL
As soon as you see that verification successful message,
you're presented with an option to click finish
which will mark your blog as done
and update its status
in the FTP migration
dashboard.
You'll now see of course that
your posts will appear immediately,
and for more on
what's
new on Blogger since you
were set up on FTP, you can click on that link.
You'll see here in the dashboard
migration status
it's complete
You're now done!