Thought Sparks

Since I am in the middle of redirecting traffic from my blogspot site to thoughtsparks.net, I thought I’d pass along a great tip to encourage others to do likewise.

First off, here’s what I don’t recommend: use a meta redirect or javascript redirect from the front page. It will mess with your search ranking as search engines see that as a no no. However, it may be worth redirecting your most popular posts to the new site. Ideally Google would offer a 301 permanent redirect from your blogspot URL to the new domain, but I haven’t found that to be the case. A 301 is much friendlier for search engines than client-side redirects which are often abused.

Please note: Redirecting specific posts will not work on any post from the first page when accessing from the browser. Linking to any post will work. You may want to decrease the number of posts to your blogspot blog to accommodate.

To apply a redirect from a specific post in blogspot to your respective post in your new location:

1. Go and Edit Post.
2. Click on the "Edit HTML" tab.
3. Post the following code:<script type="text/javascript"> document.location.href=’http://www.yourdomain.com/specificpage…/’</script>

There’s nothing really that special about the javascript, but I didn’t find anyone out there that was recommending or seem to know to take this step. I have not tried this, but I believe it will work for wordpress.com and other sites.