Forced swith to new Blogger creates havoc

Blogger users have had the option to convert to new Blogger for a while, but about three weeks ago Blogger started to force some users to switch to the new version. So although I had resisted as long as I could, I had to take the plunge this weekend.

I have been afraid to switch because many bloggers have experienced major problems with new Blogger. At the Blogger Help Group you can find hundreds and hundreds of posts where people ask for advice because they are unable to publish or something isn’t working properly. This blogger even compares new Blogger with new Coke.

And unfortunately my worries were well-founded. After the conversion my permalinks don’t work anymore, either in the Atom feed or on the blog. Posts used to be archived in a folder called ‘arkiv’ and the permalinks to each post previously looked like this:

http://www.kullin.net/arkiv/2007_02_01_mc.html#654503616037586102

But now the /arkiv/ part is missing and I don’t know how to change it. The new URLs (that don’t work) look like this:

http://www.kullin.net/2007_02_01_mc.html#654503616037586102

I really hope I can solve this, but at the moment I don’t know how. The only solution I’ve found so far is to give all the 1,000 blog posts a new unique URL. That will mean that any incoming links to one of my blog posts will stop working and I will lose my Google Page Rank (PR6), Technorati rank and any other blog rank worth its salt.

Any help with this issue is much appreciated.

When I looked for solutions to the permalink problem, I noticed that several bloggers have found themselves, at least temporarily, thrown out of Google after upgrading. Apparently Blogger had inserted a “NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW” tag to every page of this blog. Check this and this.

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