Blogger™ Byebye… Hello WordPress 2.0

Yes, I made the switch. Yes, I know this Kubrick theme is not unique and there are tons of blogs out there with the same theme since it is the current default theme in WordPress. I’ll improve on that later on, too busy to work on my themes right now. And if I had links to your sites, sorry… I will put them back soon. I just needed to work on other things first.

I have blog post since 2004 using Blogger, and WordPress 2.0 seemed to have no problem importing all my Bloggerâ„¢ postings. I had one problem though… I did a search on Googleâ„¢ for all of my blog pages in their database by searching site:blog.benjarriola.com and if you expand the search to show all pages, there were tons of pages that were giving Error 404’s (page not found).

Since Bloggerâ„¢ and WordPress had different kinds of permalinks. For example… the first error 404 i got was for this URL found in Google:

https://blog.benjarriola.com/2004/07/house-blessing-by-kuya-jef.html

and WordPress was doing it this way:

https://blog.benjarriola.com/2004/07/31/the-house-blessing-by-kuya-jef

In reality, the directories do not really exist since WordPress is doing a mod_rewrite for the URLs and it is simply checking the database for the post name: house-blessing-by-kuya-jef.html and if it cannot be found, then it displays an error 404 which is simply pulling the file 404.php, which is part of the default WordPress files.

So I was thinking all of these links in Google will do no where. So I decided to make the yds404-redirect. This file replaces your 404.php and also has another file 404-redirect.php what will parse the URL and search for the latest best-related title and forward to that page. This is not the best solution since a redirect 301 would be the best, but I did not want to mess with the .htaccess file. It still serves the purpose. And I just signed up for a Googleâ„¢ Sitemap using the WordPress plugin so i can tell Googleâ„¢ to update their database. I know this will take a long time, but at least, while it is not yet in effect, the yds404-redirect will do the trick.

For those that have the same problem in converting from Bloggerâ„¢ to WordPress and search engines have you linked and goes to an error 404 page, feel free to try out my yds404-redirect.