I was surfing the net today and found a site that gives great directions for moving your blog from Blogger.com to your own hosted WordPress blog. I realized when I started reading this that I had never set up my old blog to automatically redirect to this one.

There are some good reasons for doing this. First of all, you want your readers to come and find you at your new address as soon as possible. I know it’s enough for most of them to just follow the link to your new blog, but if someone is just finding your old blog for the first time, it makes sense to send them to the new one right away, especially if all of the old content is on the new site as well.

I was also wondering if the search engines have or had penalized me for having duplicate content on my new site. It may be that that has contributed to the Google Sandbox effect that I’ve discussed before. I don’t know if I’ll be able to tell, but the spiders and bots that were crawling my old site should now be redirected automatically to the new one.

Regardless, it’s a good idea to automatically send readers and surfers to your new site once you’ve moved. Check out the article I’ve linked to. The instructions are easy to follow and it didn’t take me more than a few minutes to get it all working (and half that time was spent waiting on Blogger!).