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Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a series of posts on what to do after you purchase a site or blog. The SitePoint Marketplace is something I check daily. By the looks of it, many publishers in the ‘make money online’ niche are looking to get out as soon as they can so there’s no better time to learn how to merge two sites together.

If you haven’t already read them, please take a look at Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series:

- Part I - The Checklist
- Part II - Analysis of “What’s Hot
- Part III - .htaccess (redirection) Mastery

Last month we purchased the rights to two great blogs. The above posts, and future ones on this topic are a near complete account of the ‘recipe’ we use after acquiring the sites. In my opinion it’s valuable enough information to stick in an eBook on the topic, but free for you as a reader of this site :).

RSS Transfer and Migration

A big piece of any blog is it’s RSS subscriber base. Some will argue that readers follow an individual and not the site. I would agree that this is true, but I think if you sub in an author who can bring enough of a value proposition to stay to the table, then there’s no reason why a reader would leave (unless they were truly in love with the previous blogger in more ways than one.)

If the site you’ve just purchased uses feedburner to manage RSS subscribers you’re in luck.

How to Get Subscribers from the Old Site to the New

Before getting started, make sure you transfer the feed to your account from the previous owner. Once you have the feed in your possession, you’re ready to get started merging both feeds together. For a few years Feedburner has had a function that will automatically forward subscribers to a different feed for 30 days. The actions this function will take are as follows:

Day 1-10: Any requests for the FeedBurner feed are sent an HTTP 301 “Permanent Redirect” response back to your source feed. This will cause most feed readers to forget the FeedBurner URL and use the new URL from that point on. Your subscribers don’t feel a thing.

Day 11-20: If your FeedBurner feed is still getting requests at this point, it probably means that your feed reader is treating that “Permanent Redirect” as a “Temporary Redirect”. That’s actually pretty common, so now we enter “Phase 2″. Now, any requests for your FeedBurner feed will receive a “redirect document”. What is a redirect document? Dave Winer displayed foresight by anticipating this need back in 2002 and provided this specification so that a publisher could keep control of their feed location. We strongly encourage more feed readers to support this specification, and we are going to be widely campaigning for this capability.

Day 21-30: You’re still here? Well, at this point we return a valid feed that contains a single item that says “This feed has moved to (feed URL here)”. So even though all of the transparent mechanisms to redirect the subscription have failed, there’s still a trail for your subscribers to follow.

Services like iGoogle and Google Reader should pick this up automatically. The first step in making this happen is editing the feed details of the feed you’ll be canceling (A). What you need to do is update the source feed to be your new target feed (B), which is the site you’re going to continue to write at.

Once you set the source feed and save, click the ‘delete feed’ for (A). Don’t freak out just yet, you’ll get a confirmation box where you can check to enable redirection:

Over a few days you should see that most subscribers will eventually migrate to your new feed (B). If you end up transferring all the subscribers, your account should look like this:

Note that both feeds of the blogs we acquired are now at 0 subscribers. One crucial point to note is that this redirection does not account for email subscribers. You’ll have to email the feedburner staff (who are very helpful) to manually transfer them over.

The above information will be extremely helpful to anyone who has recently bought a blog, changed their feed address or domain, or needs to consolidate feeds. The next post in this series will cover how to manage the switch (from an emotional perspective) with your audience. Stay tuned!

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