very good advice. additionally, if a splogger takes over an abandoned blog, you can get it back -- posts intact -- by emailing customer support and saying something to the effect of "deleted my blog, splogger took it over, can I get the old one back" and -- because it's a splog -- the answer is yes. May not always be yes, but I know of several personal bloggers who were able to successfuly get their host & posts back. I guess there's a snapshot made when you delete it, one that can be retrieved.

I had accidentally imported my blog into wordpress at some point, and what it (WP) did was created a link to the wordpress blog on my blogspot blog.

Redirection from the main page is probably the safest bet to not have sploggers take over your brand, your goodwill and the like.

But as for the problem with the post page links, I have no idea how to maintain those - I guess if you migrate, you better have a good reason to, and you should be prepared to bite that bullet once and settle down on the provider of choice/comfort.

As for me, despite all its shortcomings, I am sticking with blogger :-)

Hmm, this advice seems to be in contrast to the Search Engine Optimisation crowd. I understood their rule-of-thumb was to leave the old site up for a week or two (to ensure spidering) but then immediately pull it down. Why? Apparently, modern search engines penalise duplicate content. Since they can't tell which is the "real" one, they assume the second one is fake (or a splog) and punish it in the rankings.

However, if the second one is legit, then only the owner can take down the first one, so they check to see if the first one still exists. Got it? Search engines assume dupe sites are bad, unless the original is removed.

How can we reconcile these two points of view?

Interesting counterpoint, Greg, & of course you're right.... I guess any regular readers of a blog that is moving will get the word, & move with the blog. I just find it interesting that this has happened more than once. My first blogger URL (no readers, no subs, so who cares) was repopulated as a splog almost immediately & is still there w/ porn-prose as a placeholder for whatever else is intended.

Sisyphean Musings, though, was a bigger blog, w/ inbounds from Instapundit & other places, & so you would think that more readers are affected?

I'm guessing the blogger set-up would make redirects tricky, & that search engines wouldn't respect a final post that said "I've moved..."

How about taking the old blog down, then getting it right back yourself, before a splogger can jump in there, and writing a single post that says "I moved." Or does that count as illegal traffic-driving too? Hmmmmm.

With the way Blogger works realistically you have to depend on javascript redirects or something... I'd like to keep the old posts at least existant so permalinks still work and just do a js redirect... but if search engines penalize that it might be worth looking into blanking out the posts or something...

I have the hacks archived. I think many have become obsolete by now.

However, I'd be happy to re-post any you still want.