MamaBlogga

One of the most popular WordPress plugins is called Subscribe to Comments. This handy little plugin adds the check box you’ll find below my comment box.

Check the box and you’ll receive updates of the comments on that post delivered right to your email inbox. Whether you’re curious about the same subject, waiting to respond to another commenter or just want to know how other people reacted, you can stay current on blogs that use this plugin. TypePad blogs can have the same feature with a script, Subtocomments.

A few weeks back, I spent a couple frustrating hours trying to rig a hack to do the same for Blogger. I never succeeded—but that’s okay, because last week Blogger unveiled a new feature:

This check box does exactly what it says! It only appears if you’re signed in to your Google/Blogger account, however, so if you want to follow a Blogger blog post, be sure you’re signed in.

Why would I want this feature on my blog?
This feature is ultimately all about your readers—though helping your readers almost always helps your blog!

Letting your readers keep track of your blog at their convenience is similar to using RSS feeds, in my opinion. Let them read it when they want, where they want, and surprisingly often, they’ll come back to your site, whether to comment or to read others’ comments.

It’s all about the stickiness!

Would you like to know more about developing your blog’s stickiness? I’ve written a free guide to increasing your blog’s stickiness, “Get Your Visitors to Stick!“

I made the switch to my own domain just over 3 months ago. I’ve loved it! But moving your blog, especially if your blog is well established, can be a scary thing.

Why? Because it can break every link that your site has already earned. Those “backlinks” bring visitors to your site and may help your search engine rankings. And if you break them, all is lost.

However, all need not be lost. There is a safe way to move your blog or your website that (most) search engines recognize quickly.

If you’re moving from Blogger/Blogspot to self-hosted WordPress, I recommend my Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress, which includes two vital steps to preserving your backlinks. These steps are:

1. properly implemented redirects
2. maintaining your permalink structure

Of course, if you do #1 right, #2 may be moot. With proper redirects you can change your entire permalink structure without breaking backlinks and losing search engine love.

But first, we need to:

Evaluate Why You Want to Change
Why do you want to change your URL/domain/blog home? Some good reasons for changing your URL:

• You don’t own your previous URL.
• You can’t control your previous URL.
• Your site/business has evolved into something completely different, and your domain name is completely irrelevant.
• Your site is expanding and the blog will no longer be at its core. Perhaps moving the blog to a subdirectory is smart—but be sure to use conditional rewrite rules, or people trying to visit the new pages of your site might be redirected to nowhere.

Not as good reasons for moving your blog:

• Your latest domain name is cooler—will you change every time you snap up a cool new domain?
• You don’t like having the blog on the front page, but it will still be a very prominent part of your site-If you’re publishing with WordPress, you can set a static page as the “home page” and not have to move anything. This option is found under Options>Reading>Front page. Select “A static page.” The pages system in WordPress is also a fairly good content management system (CMS).
• Your site/business has changed slightly, and the old URL is not quite as spot-on as it used to be, though it’s still pretty relevant—unless you have a far superior domain name that has significant type-in traffic, you’ll probably be better off explaining to your visitors the full scope of what you do. However, this example may be borderline.

Prepare for the Move
One of the best things to do before you move your blog/site is to generate an XML sitemap for your old site. (This assumes, of course, that you’ve already mapped out a lovely, themed site archetecture, if your site isn’t blog-only.) Hold on to that puppy, because it’s pretty important.

If you’re migrating into WordPress (and especially any part of your blog has been hosted on anything other than WordPress), it’s important to set up your permalinks before importing your old posts. I highly recommend using the Custom Permalinks option, and having your %posttitle% your permalinks.

If feasible, you might consider using a Custom Permalink structure similar to your old one. If you’re importing directly from Blogger to WordPress, for example, you might consider the permalink structure /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html to minimize redirect problems. Not absolutely necessary, but nice.

Be sure to line up some highly linkable content for the first few days and weeks after the move.

Finally, test your design and your new site to make sure it’ll be ready when you throw the switch.

Move
Whether you’re just manually copying your files over or using your blog software’s built-in import feature, you gotta get your files there somehow. Unless you’re using domain masking. That’s another story all together.

Redirection
Make sure you have proper redirects in place. If this is a permanent move, use “301 redirects” to indicate to search engines that this is permanent. Visitors and search engines will automatically be transferred to the appropriate page on your new site if you use these rewrites.

There are various ways of handling this. You can login to your domain registrar and 301 the entire domain over. You can login to your old website and modify the individual pages to include 301 notices in their code. Or you can login to the back end of your website, using Apache or Windows Servers to redirect the old URLs.

The first options here only change the domain name in the URL. If you also changed your permalink structure, be sure to implement redirects for that, too. (It’s probably best to avoid chained redirects, i.e. a visitor going to oldblog.info/superpost.html being sent to yourblog.net/superpost.html being sent to yourblog.net/duperpost.html being sent to yourblog.net/duperpost/. You can handle most of these changes in 1-2 rules rewrite rules.)

For the actual implementation of 301 redirects, I must defer to those who are much more informative than am I:

• Lisa Barone at Bruce Clay Blog on Apache (.htaccess) and Windows servers
• Chris Gray at SEO Ladder with the codes for meta refresh (which, as he states, is not recommended), PHP, Apache, C#.NET and Java/JSP.
• SEOmoz’s Guide to Applying 301 Redirects with Apache with redirects and URL rewriting (which I used when changing my permalink structure).

The Aftermath
Now you’ve done it. You’ve flipped the switch and your new site is live. Be sure to go back through your old site’s URLs (a sample of them, at least) to double check that redirects are going to the right place.

If they’re good, submit that old site sitemap to Yahoo and Google. This will tell them to visit your old links, whereupon they’ll learn they’re redirected to your new links. (Once they’ve come through and learned that, go ahead and replace it with your new site’s sitemap.)

Unfortunately, Technorati will be a casualty in the move. At present, they have no way to edit your blog’s URL, so your new URL shows up as a completely separate blog. (If this changes, I’ll let you know.) If your redirects are written correctly, your posts on your new blog will show up as coming from both your new blog and your old blog. Plus, any internal links within your posts will come up as incoming links to your new blog from your old blog. Confusing enough?

Do what you can to recoup your Technorati authority: e-mail people that you have connections with, asking them to update their links. Also go through Technorati’s steps to delete your old blog. Really, it’s just clutter at this point. Finally, post that really killer, linkable content to earn more links—important for search engine rankings and Technorati authority.

Bear in mind that it will take time for the correct URLs to update in search engine results, but the URLs will change. It took me about 2 weeks before my new URLs started showing up in results. I’ve also seen a page that I redirected a few weeks ago still not change its URL in the results. Aaron Wall’s article this week says he noticed Google & Yahoo change pretty quickly, but MSN/Windows Live not so much.

Don’t forget to update your other blogging add-ons: Google Analytics, FeedBurner, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and anywhere you may have entered your old blog as your website or homepage.

One final concern that you might have: this “sandbox” (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it). I didn’t experience it for my new site. It’s only 3 months old and I’m in the top 10 for some interesting (and some useful) terms: migrate from Blogger to WordPress, blog stickiness, mom blog advice, etc.

This doesn’t mean that your toolbar PageRank will transfer immediately; this is only updated every few months. Patience. Unless you’re using ReviewMe or Text Link Ads, it doesn’t mean much anyway.

Personally, I think that using the 301 redirects to transfer the trust you built up on your old domain to the new one is the best way to avoid the “new site” penalty. Of course, I didn’t have a ton of trust on my old site, but I did have several months’ of content. (Also, my domain wasn’t brand-new; it was “gently aged.”)

Good luck!

Part of the eMoms at Home Second Group Research Project

Have you noticed the “U Comment, I Follow” badges on many blogs? Even if you’re on Blogger, you can join the “Dofollow” movement.

What’s “Dofollow”? It’s a reaction to the automatic code that most blogging platforms attach to comment links (both the names of your commenters and any links they include in their comments). This code, rel=”nofollow”, was created to tell search engines that you don’t really trust this link, so they shouldn’t take this link as a “vote” for or endorsement of it.

Why should you remove “nofollow”? It’s like a nice little gift to give your commenters (and possibly an incentive for people to comment on your blog!). Here on MamaBlogga, our current policy is to remove the “nofollow” tags from your name link in the comments after you’ve made ten comments (handled via plugin). You can share the link love, too!

How to Remove Nofollow
You can remove the nofollow tag pretty easily. In fact, if you’re on WordPress, there’s an abundance of plugins that will do this for you quite painlessly (Andy Beard has an “ultimate” list of these). Other programs require a little bit of programming work, but it’s well worth it.

Moveable Type/TypePad
Moveable Type-based platforms are a little more tricky. In addition to adding a “nofollow,” they also implement a redirect. For example, instead of a link going straight to “MamaBlogga.com” it goes first to “http://www.typepad.com/t/comments?__mode=red&user_id=715412&id=72558418″ (I made the numbers up) and then to “MamaBlogga.com.” Once again, this isn’t very nice as far as search engines go. For removing the nofollow and this redirect on Moveable Type, see Now is a Long Time Too. For TypePad, see ConverStations.

Blogger
For Blogger, go to Layout>Edit HTML. Check the little “Expand Widgets Templates” box. Scroll down to the comments section (it would probably be useful to paste your code into Notepad and use the Find function). Find this code: <a expr:href=’data:comment.authorUrl’ rel=’nofollow’> . Delete the “rel=’nofollow’” portion and save your layout.

Update: this will remove the nofollow from comments when viewed on a single post, but not when viewed in a popup or separate window from Blogger. For example, when you view a single post on Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum, the “nofolllow” is removed from the comments. However, if you view the same comments in a separate page or popup window, the nofollow is still there. Those second windows are on a Blogger domain, and as far as I know, there’s nothing you can do about it.

(If you’re on the old Blogger template, this is found under Template>Edit HTML. The code to replace is <a href=”>$BlogBacklinkURL$>” rel=”nofollow”><$BlogBacklinkTitle$></a> you can’t remove nofollow from commenters .)

When making a comment on a Blogger/BlogSpot blog
Blogger will still use a similar redirect scheme to TypePad, only the link leads to something like “http://www.blogger.com/profile/16523599384736451872.” However, as a commenter, you can get around this. If the blog allows, you’ll have three options on the comments: your blogger profile, Other and Anonymous. Your blogger profile is the default, but it creates a link to your blogger profile, and not your blog. However, if you select Other, you can enter whatever name and URL that you like.

Be sure to stay tuned next week for another helpful blogging tip and an exciting MamaBlogga announcement!

Ready to make your blog unique? This may look like intense coding, but it’s really not that hard.

Favicons
Favicons are the little pictures that show up next to your blog’s name on the address bar. Look where it says “http://www.mamablogga.com”—see the tiny picture of Hayden? So cute.

Here’s another example (the little pink 5, the MP, the Gmail logo):

Favicons also show up in bookmarks, which helps visitors remember your site better:

I know you want one now—and you’re not alone. In fact, some of my favorite blogs are without favicons. So I made some for them:

scribbit: ; An Island Life: ; 5 Minutes for Mom:
(If there’s one there for you, feel free to take it!)

(To make your own, create a square image and reduce it down to 16 x 16. Michelle at scribbit mentions a site that will create a favicon for you. You may want to save it as favicon.ico; read on to find out why.)

Now what? Well, if you’re your own hosting, just look through your files and find ‘favicon.ico.’ (If you’re on Bluehost (aff), for example, it’s under the www folder.) Upload your own favicon.ico and overwrite the file.

If you’re not hosting your blog yourself (i.e. you’re on wordpress.com, typepad.com or blogspot.com), don’t despair! You can get rid of the W/speech bubble/B. Upload your picture to your blog (you can use an old post that you don’t mind sticking an image in, or you can simply use a draft—the post doesn’t have to be published). Copy the location of the image. (In Blogger, it’s something like http://bp2.blogger.com/<crazy strings of letters & numbers>/favicon.ico . Replace the example.com URL in the code below with the URL of your picture:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" />
<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" />

In Blogger, go to Template > Edit HTML. After the opening <head> tag, paste the above code (with your picture’s URL). Save and check it out! In WordPress & TypePad, if you can edit your <head> tags, do the same there.

Can’t find the right place? Here’s a screen shot to help. The first arrow shows the favicon code; the second shows the place for the next part.

Branded Headers
Add a tagline or phrase to describe your blog in your headers: mine is “mom’s search for meaning,” scribbit’s is “A Blog About Motherhood in Alaska” (Michelle mentioned this in January).

In WordPress, there’s a plugin to help with this, though even I had trouble getting it to work for a while (now it works great). When editing your headers in Blogger, WordPress or TypePad, leave what’s already there and add something right before the </title> tag. This phrase will appear on every page on your site (and some of your friends might start using it in their links back to your blog).

Not only can this have some effect on your search engine rankings, but (more importantly in my opinion) it also helps your visitors figure out what your site is about. I know I’m very used to looking at my site; I know exactly what it’s about and how it works and how to use the navigation. However, if a visitor comes to my site for the first time, I want him/her to be able to figure out what my site is all about very quickly.

Any questions/clarifications/cries for help? Leave them in the comments and you might win a prize!

RSS is an important acronym in the blogosphere. It’s usually interpreted as Really Simple Syndication, so we’ll start with the really simple and work our way up. I think we have something for even the most seasoned blogger here.

Basic
First, an excellent explanation of the easiest way to keep up with dozens (hundreds!) of blogs from Common Craft:

Click To Play

Also under “basics,” your blog generates an RSS feed automatically (unless you’ve disabled this feature).

Novice
FeedBurner “burns” your blog feed for you, making it easy for your readers to subscribe in any feed reader. If you click on the green “Subscribe” button in the sidebar, you’ll be taken to a page to choose your feed reader.

FeedBurner can also add a lot of cool features to your feed. You can add information at the end of messages in a feed reader like copyrights, number of comments, social bookmarking stuff—there are more than 100 “FeedFlares.” FeedBurner can also track visitors to your site and show you how many subscribers you have.

Intermediate
Many people use only partial feeds for their sites, sending only excerpts or summaries to their readers. There are a few reasons for this; among them is the legitimate concern about unscrupulous people republishing your blog with zero effort—and making money off your hard wraught writing.

However, the benefits of full feeds outweigh the risks. [UPDATE: the full story on full feeds] Also note that many people publish excerpt feeds believing that more people will visit their site to read their full posts—but FeedBurner CEO Rick Klau says they’ve seen no evidence to support that. See Partial Feeds Don’t Draw Visitors at Marketing Pilgrim for more on the subject.

In Blogger, you can switch from excerpts to full feeds by going to Settings > Site Feed. From the pull down menu, select “Full.” (If you’re in Advanced Mode, the second and third options are at your discretion.)

In WordPress, select Options > Reading.

Under “Syndication Feeds,” for the option “For each article, show,” select “Full text.”

See Semantically driven for details on how to switch to full feeds in TypePad.

Advanced
Make sure your readers find your FeedBurner feed (instead of the default, less user-friendly feed Blogger, WordPress or Typepad creates). You may have to code it into your site. For example, in Blogger, go to Template > Edit HTML. In your code, find the line:

<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

Delete it and replace it with the following (after you’ve customized it):

<meta content=’text/html; charset=UTF-8′ http-equiv=’Content-Type’/>
<meta content=’true’ name=’MSSmartTagsPreventParsing’/>
<meta content=’blogger’ name=’generator’/>
<link href=’http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR FEEDBURNER FEED NAME HERE’ rel=’alternate’ title=’YOUR BLOG NAME HERE RSS Feed’ type=’application/rss+xml’/>

Blogger now offers integration with FeedBurner. Here are the instructions on integrating your FeedBurner feed with your Blogger blog. TypePad also features this capability.

WordPress has a handy FeedBurner feed replacement plugin to do that heavy coding for you.

Total pro
If you’re comfortable in Apache, consider Daniel’s strategy for making sure that your subscribers are using the correct feed even if you leave FeedBurner (from Daily Blog Tips). (To tell the truth, I can only vaguely understand this one.)

Also, look at another post from Marketing Pilgrim (and no, this one’s not by me, it’s by Jeremy Luebke) on why you should not use click tracking on FeedBurner (read on the comments to see how to fix that).

Anybody out there quite proficient in MT/Typepad? I started on Blogger and had to learn WordPress for work before I made the switch to WordPress here on MamaBlogga. If anyone can give some pointers on the same issues on TypePad, it would be appreciated!

UPDATE: A big thank you to Jen once again at Semantically driven for explaining how to set your feed to full posts on Typepad. She had got screenshots and everything. Man, I should’ve thought of that. I’ll have to fix this. Screenshots added. Thank you, Jen!!

Yes, I may miss Blogger, but I’m glad I made the switch to WordPress. And I’ll tell you why.

1. Customizable. You can make WordPress do just about anything, it seems, by simply finding and uploading the right plugin. Like today, I wanted a plugin to selectively remove the “nofollow” on commenters’ links (coming soon). I Googled “selectively remove nofollow links wordpress” and found a big list of plugins to do just that in a few different ways.
2. I feel professional, probably partially because this is the platform I blog with for work.
3. It’s pretty easy to use, though there is a bit of a learning curve.
4. I feel cool when I get to fiddle with things in the back end. Half the time I’m working on my site, I’ve got WordPress and my file manager or FTP open, uploading plugins and tweaking files.
5. It’s a complete content management system. No comments on that one… Sorry.
6. All sorts of cool built-in features like password protecting posts and trackbacks (couldn’t do that with Blogger!) and lots of stuff.

Of course, WordPress isn’t for everyone. If you want to, you can stay with Blogger. I give you permission.