It’s very frustrating. 16% of visitors still come to the new URL using the META tag redirect on the old front page.

I was actually able to transition most of my traffic over to the new domain and have increased it by 100% in the past three months. I still keep detailed daily stats on the traffic of both blogs and while the Blogger-hosted version maintains a steady flow of search engine traffic, the new blog (thanks to your awesome suggestions on this blog) is really starting to break out.

Part of the deal in transitioning all of my old posts over to my PowerBlogs platform is that the comments on older posts must still be hosted on the Blogger server, so 301 redirects weren’t an option. So, I changed my title to say “This blog is now hosted at “http://boyswearpants.com.”

From what I can tell, it worked pretty well.

Keep up the great work, Darren. 30 Days to a Better Blog has become my bible the past month. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!

A word to the wise might be that if you are using one of the cheap or free blogging platforms like TypePad or Blogger, you would be better served to own your own domain name…makes it a lot easier to switch to a new platform.

I was blogspot so had to do the javascript redirect. I hate it that happened because it has taken me 2 mos to get my page rank back… The last 2 mos could have been spent upping the page rank rather than re-earning it.

Redirect Permanent /path/to/old/permalink http://mydomain.com/path/to/new/permalink

After you generate the template, copy and paste that into your .htaccess file. If you’re moving over to Wordpress, I’d recommend putting that before the Wordpress generated .htaccess code.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^newsite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The above will respect all page names and not just send users to the root of your new site.

That said, I had to figure out how to do the inline ads and multiple index pages myself, since TypePad doesn’t offer these as standard functionality. I’d gladly share my template code with anyone who needs it.

and lost virtually all traffic from google (I’m still in the sandbox).

I moved two blogs from subdirectories on one domain that had good PR to new domains, using htaccess 301 (permanent redirect) on those subdirectories and pointing to the new domain. My statistics dropped off sharply, because Google stopped pointing people at the original site, and my ranking dropped for the new domain.
I read somewhere that you should do a 302 (temporary redirect) first, as you don’t lose ranking, but I’m not convinced.
About three weeks after the switch, one of my blogs is now ranking better than it did before on the same terms, and my visitors are increasing at the same rate they were before the switch. Of course regular/feed readers wouldn’t really notice as all was switched.
It’s worth doing as early on as possible. I decided that my earnings/readership wasn’t so high that any drop would be disastrous. I lost 50% visitors, but 50% of a low three-digit daily readership is better that 50% of a 4 or 5 digit readership.
HTML header/Javascript redirects aren’t looked at favourably by the SEs, so moving from Blogger etc. might be more painful. I had the luxury of a host with htaccess.
It’s nearly always worth moving from a free host or a non-descript/out-of-context domain to a relevant domain on your own web host. Don’t be put off by the temporary drop in traffic – carry on feeding your blog and it will continue to flourish
Google was the harshest SE I’d seen – and that only took about 3 weeks to recover. MSN/Yahoo hardly made a difference – although I get less visitors from them, they consistently ranked my site during the switchover.

The problem with using JavaScript or meta tags to do the redirection is that the search engines won’t treat them as such. You really need to be able to do proper HTTP redirects, which does require more access to the system than Blogger provides for sites you host on its own system. It’s too bad, but something to think about when starting a new blog.

Which would be better?

301 redirects are usually created either on the server or using htaccess.