New Blogger, nofollow and wordpress import

Well most of you who run blogger blogs (blogspot) have heard about blogger.com moving out of beta and requiring all users who switch to start logging in with their google account or gmail account. I was quite skeptical of this at first and did not want to switch over because I didn’t see the point. Being part of a community blog however forced me to switch because one of the other participants switched and that required everyone that was apart of the community blog to switch. I was not happy.

After switching over (blogger.com makes you switch every blog you own) I noticed on one of my blogs that the nofollow attribute was added to every single link on my bog. Nofollow is the search engines way of trying to control spam by not allowing valuable pagerank to be passed on to spam sites, that is after all why spammers spam your blog,, to get some of your pagerank and to have their site quickly spidered by the search engine bots. Anyway, after viewing one of my blogspot blogs (after switching) revealed nofollow links on everything,, my post titles, my blogroll etc. I have a firefox plugin called “searchstatus” installed (which btw is a great tool for viewing pagerank and alexa rank as well as a host of other details about any site you are on) allowing me to see who is using nofollow links and to my surprise every link on my blog had the nofollow attribute on it. Btw, here is what nofollow links look like when using the searchstatus plugin.

If you install the searchstatus plugin for firefox you can easily see if your blog has these nofollow attributes applied by simply viewing your blog with the “highlight nofollow links” selected in the toolbar. Here is a screenshot of it:
Nofollow is bad if you want to pass some of your google pagerank onto other sites you own. So I immediately looked at the source code of my bog (right-click and view source) in firefox. I noticed in the meta tags there was a noindex/nofollow tag who was the culprit. So I went into blogger.com’s control panel and viewed the template for that blog. There is a tag called {metadata} or something similar in the head of the template. To fix the nofollow problem I copied the meta info from the source code of the blog and pasted that where the {metadata} tag was and removed the noindex/nofollow part. That fixed the problem and I was much happier.

Before I found this fix I wanted to move all my blogs off of blogger.com altogether. I had already installed the latest version of wordpress on another site of mine to get ready for the import.. which worked on the old blogger btw. Now, after looking into it wordpress is no longer capable of importing all your posts from a blogspot blog into your new wordpress blog. This looks like blogger.com’s new way of keeping people from moving away from blogspot. Hopefully wordpress can come up with a fix for this because I never recommend people start blogging with a blogspot domain (even though it’s free) simply because they will never own their blog, blogger.com will. If you build up a popular blog on blogspot you will always have to succumb to blogger.com’s user interface and their rules.

I’m sure there are more bad things about the new blogger.com coming out of beta and if you know of more please leave a comment about it. Or if you have something good to say share it.

Update: March 22nd.

I’ve been notified by Mark Wilson who kindly enough shared a new blogger import plugin you can use to import your blogger blog posts into wordpress. Read more of Mark’s post Bye-Bye Blogger Hello WordPress. Thanks Mark!