Hiding or Redirecting Blogs

If you want to use your imported Shopify blog as the canonical source of your content, we have a few suggestions or tips for doing so.

Please note that we recommend leaving canonical tags enabled, and do not aid in redirecting or hiding your external blogs. You should understand SEO and your blogging platform, or work with a Shopify Expert if not.

BlogFeeder has a setting to enable canonical tags on imported posts, and this is on by default to avoid any duplicate content penalties. If you disable this setting, you should hide or redirect your old blog posts (but not image URLs, as images cannot be imported to Shopify, so you should have them hosted somewhere and accessible to BlogFeeder).

If you use WordPress:

If you use WordPress.com to host your blog, you can generally get a free hosted blog (or downgrade to a free plan), which will allow you to host images here. You can import your blog posts, then un-publish them once BlogFeeder has imported them to Shopify. This will let you use Shopify as the canonical source of your content while keeping your images hosted.

If you use a self-hosted (WordPress.org) blog, then you can continue to pay for hosting to keep your images hosted (and downgrade your plan most likely), then un-publish your posts once they've been imported. If you don't want to continue to keep your website hosted, you could try to do the following (or hire a developer to help with):

Import your blog to a free WordPress.com blog
Republish all posts
Import posts into Shopify using BlogFeeder from this new free blog
Unpublish all posts, which leaves images intact, but lets BlogFeeder be the canonical source of content

Redirecting Old Content

The most effective SEO method to transfer content from one blog to another is to set up 301 redirects for all content. This is not an easy task, and if you import from an external blog, it may not be possible (depending on what capabilities your external blogging software offers). For example, you could set up 301 redirects for a self-hosted WordPress blog, but not from a WordPress.com blog.

You would need to set up a 301 redirect from your external blog's domain to your Shopify blog. Redirecting individual post URLs to the new Shopify URL tells search engines this content has moved, while preserving any existing SEO for these posts. However, this is a time-intensive process, and you should exclude any media folders so BlogFeeder can still access images from your old site / URLs within blog posts.