Google Blogger Backup and Import Did Not Work as Planned

Google Blogger's Import Feature 

Well, I lost a couple of days working around some issues that I have seemingly found with Google Blogger's backup and restore capability. Simply put, the re-imported website did not match the previous day's website. The difference was in the URL's themselves. 

Why are the URL's themselves important?

If this URL was previously indexed by Google, then until Google refreshes its indexing of the website, all the links in SERPS -- Search Engine Results Pages - return 404 errors!

There is apparently a counter that gets implemented in the Google Blogger backend. As far as I could "reverse engineer" it, when the post matches a previous post verbatim, even a deleted previous post, Google Blogger appends an underscore and a number to the URL. 

Computer Screen with Colorful Code Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The Bigger The Site, The Bigger The Problem

Luckily, this site is small and I was able to compensate for the changing  URL's by using redirection.

Over time, the search engine spiders will read the new sitemaps.xml and the latest URL's will replace the old ones. 

In the meantime, I have manually updated the redirects to direct the link to the new URL. 

 I'll post more about how I resolved my issues if there is interest. 

Google Blogger Throttles Usage of the Import Command

Another interesting thing I observed is that Google Blogger throttles the use of the "import" command. 

Apparently, this command impacts their servers, so they restrict the number of times one can use the import command. 

One the threshold is reached, a message appears directing you to try it tomorrow. This would be disasterous if you were trying to get a site up-and-running.

However, tonight I am am much less satisfied with Google Blogger as a problem of the type I encountered would be quite severe if one had thousands of urls to alter.