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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301 Meta Refresh Redirects: How Google and Yahoo Sees It

Normally the best practice for 301/302 (permanent/temporary) redirects are through your web server. However, you can only do this if you own your own domain. So what happens when you’re using a free webpage service such as Blogger, WordPress and Typepad, and you want to do 301 redirects to your new website?

If you’re thinking of doing Javascript redirects, this isn’t highly recommended as Google and Yahoo web crawlers won’t be able to follow the redirects, which will affect the destination’s ranking and indexing.

Although not the best, your next best bet is using the meta refresh tag to do your redirections. It seems that Google recognises meta redirects and Googlebot should be able to crawl to the new page, according to Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

Yahoo’s Search Help also seems to recognise meta redirects and the crawler will be able to follow the redirects.

It appears that a meta refresh delay of 0 or 1 second will be considered as a 301 redirect and anything longer is considered a 302.

I will try to post a javascript solution that will be able to handle redirects from your old website to appropriate pages of your new website this weekend.