Blogger: Social Bookmarking Widget – Link Baiting

I promised Hong Yi’s mum that I would write a social bookmarking widget for her blog on Google‘s Blogger so I’ve spent part of my valentine’s day writing this widget for her.

The purpose of utilising social bookmarking widgets is to allow you to expand your reach of readership to literally hundred and thousands to millions of readers on these social bookmarking websites. Therefore, you are not limited to your normal direct traffic, existing referrals traffic and organic traffic but if I may use a SEO term, using ‘link baiting’ to bait readers in an ocean of readers to your website in the hopes of driving traffic, increasing visibility and branding, and ultimately getting links to your website.

One of the most important SEO aspects is link building or in other words, to increase the amount of links to your website. It creates authority, trust and relevancy to your website, thus improving your organic rankings on the search engine results page (SERP). You can also read my post on how to optimise your page.

Of course it is important to remember that before you submit your own articles, make sure that you write well, have a very attractive and optimised title, and a great first paragraph. In addition, write about what people would love to read about, things that are useful, relevant and informative to them. Never submit articles that are too “salesy” in nature and obviously useless information to the general public (i.e. how you’re emo-ing about the rainy weather).

Include pictures, videos and space out your paragraphs. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing a screen full of words bunched up together.

Social Bookmarking Widget

I’ve only created this widget to include some of my favourite social bookmarking websites. Feel free to modify the code and stylesheet to your preference.

Here’s a screenshot of what the widget should look like once implemented (highlighted in yellow). You can visit my old blog to see how it looks like (make sure you turn off javascript or else you’ll be redirected back here).

Before you do anything to the Blogger template, please make sure you that save a backup before making any changes!
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Limitations of Client-Side Javascript Redirect – Blogger to WordPress

You may have read my previous entry on performing a 301 redirect from Blogger to WordPress, where I wrote a script that will capture all traffic to your old Blogger site and redirect it to your new WordPress site. Ideally you’d want to do the 301 redirects from the web server, but unfortunately Blogger doesn’t allow you to do that and thus, you’re left with the client-side solution: Javascript.

First of all, let me clarify briefly on my previous post and inform you what the core strengths of my script are.

• Client-side redirect will not work without Javascript. Pretty obvious huh? What that means is that search engine crawlers aren’t able to follow the redirect. Nasty limitation in a simplistic sense.
• Strengths of my script are:
  1. It works.
  2. You need a client-side solution if you’re on Blogger. No other way.
  3. It captures and redirects all traffic from your old site to your new site.

That being said, let me now expand on these two major points: the limitations of search engine crawlers and why is capturing traffic important.

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How to 301 redirect from Blogger to WordPress

As promised in my previous post (301 Meta Refresh Redirects: How Google and Yahoo Sees It), I will show you a script I wrote that will handle 301 redirects from Blogger to WordPress using the meta refresh tag and javascript.

I have tested it on my old blogger (http://dannynsl.blogspot.com) and it seems to have worked fine so far.

There are a few steps you will first need to do.

1. Install WordPress on your domain. There should be installation tutorials on the website. I haven’t had time yet to do my own installation tutorial.
2. Import your Blogger posts into WordPress. In your dashboard, go to Manage and then Import.
   
3. Change your permalink structure. In your dashboard, go to Settings and then Permalinks. The Day and name or Month and name settings should work. However, for my script I think Month and name should be safer.
   
4. Use my javascript code just after the start of the <head> tag in your Blogger layout template. Note: Please make sure you do a backup before making changes. The variables that you need to change are old_root_domain and new_root_domain. This script handles redirection of individual posts, monthly archives and yearly archives. Anything else it will redirect to your homepage.

   When assigning values to old_root_domain and new_root_domain, DO NOT use ‘/’ at the end.

<script type='text/javascript'>
/*
 * Written by Danny Ng (http://www.dannytalk.com/2008/07/26/how-to-301-redirect-from-blogger-to-wordpress/)
 * Free to use and distribute but must keep this comment in place.
 */
var post_regex = /^http:\/\/(www.)?.*\.blogspot\.com\/\d{4}\/\d{2}\//;
var month_archive_regex = /http:\/\/(www.)?.*\.blogspot\.com\/\d{4}_\d{2}_\d{2}_archive.html/;
var year_archive_regex = /updated-min=\d{4}/;
var label_regex = /search\/label\/.+/;
var old_root_domain = 'http://dannynsl.blogspot.com', new_root_domain = 'http://www.dannytalk.com', tag_url = '/tag/', redirect_suffix;

if (post_regex.test(location.href))
	redirect_suffix = (location.href.search(/www/i) == 7) ? location.href.substring(old_root_domain.length+4, location.href.length-5) : location.href.substring(old_root_domain.length, location.href.length-5); // -5 to strip .html
else if (month_archive_regex.test(location.href))
{
	redirect_suffix = (location.href.search(/www/i) == 7) ? location.href.substring(old_root_domain.length+4, location.href.length-16) : location.href.substring(old_root_domain.length, location.href.length-16); // -16 to strip _XX_archive.html
	redirect_suffix = redirect_suffix.replace(/_/g, '/');
}
else if (year_archive_regex.test(location.href))
{
	redirect_suffix = year_archive_regex.exec(location.href).toString();
	redirect_suffix = redirect_suffix.replace(/updated-min=/, '/');
}
else if (label_regex.test(location.href))
{
	redirect_suffix = label_regex.exec(location.href).toString();
	redirect_suffix = tag_url + redirect_suffix.split('/')[2];
}
else
	redirect_suffix = '';

document.write("<meta content='0;URL=" + new_root_domain + redirect_suffix + "' http-equiv='refresh'/>");
</script>

If you want to do a 302 redirect equivalent, just change the number in the meta content from 0 to 1 or 2.

Hope this works for you and please let me know if there are any bug issues.

[edit date=26/07/08]

I just fixed the code to accommodate blog addresses with ‘www’ subdomains. As for redirects for labels, I’ll try to update the code for it tomorrow if I have time.

[/edit]

[edit date=27/07/08]

I’ve added a new regular expression to handle labels and also another variable tag_url that points to your permalink structure for tags or categories.

This setting can be found under Setting, then Permalinks and just scroll right down to the bottom. You will need to edit the variable tag_url to what you’ve sent in the permalinks structure. Make sure you add the ‘/’ at the end of it.

I think by default, WordPress automatically imports posts from Blogger and sets the labels to categories instead of tags. In this case, just set the variable to the category slug name unless you can be bothered to go through all the posts and set them as tags instead.

[/edit]

[edit date=14/02/08]

Just found a bug (thanks to Chris Lee) that the redirection didn’t seem to work in IE7. For some reason I needed to add URL= in the meta content attribute for the redirection to work.

Basically I just changed,

document.write(“<meta content=’0;” + new_root_domain + redirect_suffix + “‘ http-equiv=’refresh’/>”);

to

document.write(“<meta content=’0;URL=” + new_root_domain + redirect_suffix + “‘ http-equiv=’refresh’/>”);

Please let me know if you guys ever come across bugs for this script and I will try my best to fix it as soon as possible :)

Happy Valentines Day everyone!

[/edit]