Can I get posts from a blog host and put them on a private website ?

[Buddyweb]

Hello everybody !

My client has a blog for 2 years with many posts on overblog, a French blog host like Blogger. Now we are currently building a new website with a new blog within the site.

Those posts are valuable content that bring some traffic to the old blog. My idea was to re-publish those posts on the new blog to start with some good content. Unfortunately, the blog host don't let me use 301 redirects or re=canonical tags to tell search engines that the post is now in the new website and avoid duplicate content.

What is the best SEO solution in this case ? Can we delete the posts on the old blog and publish them in the new one ?

Thanks for your help!

Bruno

[Buddyweb]

Thanks for sharing your point of view !

I will contact Overblog to see if we can do something for that. If not I will import all the posts and put a small text in the old blog with a link to the new location of the post.

[MoosaHemani]

Your options are pretty much limited!

You can:

-          Email the customer serves and they might allow you to redirect from that blog to your new blog.

-          Import the blog and upon the new blog (no SEO value)

-          Leave a message to move to the new domain... This might not offer any SEO value but your true readers will defiantly going to shift towards the new blog.

Hope this helps!

[EGOL]

Complain to overblog.  Complain to them.

I am not kidding.  Let them know that you are not happy.  Look to see if others are complaining.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Your options are pretty limited. If over-blog won't work with you to set up 301 redirects, you may need to take down the content, upload it to its new destination, and replace the old pages with blurbs + links to the new articles.

You cannot put a rel=canonical tag anywhere but the header. So if you can't edit that, you're out of luck =/

[CleverPhD]

You mention 301s and canonical not being available - are you absolutely sure?  Try and ask the host again, sometimes when you get another customer service person you may get an answer.  The canonical would be idea.

I would not delete the old posts.  They have links to them and get traffic.  Couple of ideas come to mind.  You could basically write up a short original summary of each post and put it on the old blog.  Then have something like, if you want more information, this article has moved to and then link to the new blog post.  That would at least drive referral traffic and would take care of the duplicate issue.  In the absence of a canonical link, having a link to the "original" does help give credit.  The link to the new site would also work to give credit for the post to the new site.  At the same time, this will be kind of messy as when you change the content on the posts on the old site, you could potentially mess up the rankings of those pages.

I would test this out.  Select 10-20 articles from the old site, and see what happens.  As a comparison, take another 10-20 and just cut off the blog post after 300 words and then link to the full article on the new site.

I will be honest, as I read my suggestion, this will be kind of messy.   Go back and push for that canonical.  You can then link and copy and you will be totally clean.  All you need is access to the HEAD portion of the pages.  They look to have a "premium" option if you pay, maybe that would give you access?

Good luck!