Switched Blogger to WP, now Google can't find old Posts

Moving from one blog program to the other, probably did make your links for your posts in a new place, so it’s good you’re having Google re-scan your site.
For that other error, make sure you have this chosen. Dashboard >> Settings >> Privacy >> Allow search engines to index this site
If that is not the problem look at all your Plugins to see if any of them have a Privacy setting – or you could just turn your Plugins off and see if that fixes it.

Thanks,
Maybe the eventual google scan will fix it. My general settings do allow search engines to index the site. I just have a few plugins. How/where do I determine if they have a Privacy setting?

It depends on the plugin, each one can be different. You can either look around, or check the official website for each plugin for help on it.

Your robots.txt is just fine ??

If I google, for instance, “Plato Ship Cort” (Cort is my name) one of the top listings is an old post of mine called “Plato’s Parable of the Ship”. But when I click the listing, I get a “PAGE NOT FOUND” notice. So no one finds my info anymore!

Okay. That’s something we can fix!

That URL is https://www.spirituality-and-religion.com/2011/10/platos-parable-of-ship.html

And it should be …

https://www.spirituality-and-religion.com/2011/10/platos-parable-of-the-ship/

The easiest thing to do is go in to that post on WP and edit the slug so it’s platos-parable-of-ship (notice the missing the)

Then put this RewriteRule (.+)\.html$ /$1/ [L,R] above the #Begin WordPress call in your .htaccess – This will take all the .html URLs and redirect them to the same-named WP ones.

I really appreciate this. It sound like the solution. I just need a bit more help if you can. I really don’t know what this all means:

put this RewriteRule (.+)\.html$ /$1/ [L,R] above the #Begin WordPress call in your .htaccess

Could you tell me where to go, how to get there, and (well, maybe I can figure out what to do once I’m there, but…) how to do it?

You have to edit the file .htaccess on your server.

Do you know how to edit the files on your server?

Not a clue I’m afraid. My host is Bluehost, and I did find my cPanel which includes a section called “Files” and includes these icons:

Site Backup & Restore
File Manager
Legacy File Manager
Web Disk
Disk Space Usage
File Count
FTP Accounts
FTP Session Control
Website Movers
Unlimited FTP

Do I go somewhere in here? (I don’t see anything about an htfile, though I don’t know what an htfile is) (I clicked the one called File Manager, but didn’t see any htfile, and nothing in there was clickable anyway)

https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/htaccess ??

I did it! I actually did it (I think) I found my .htacccess file, I found #Begin WordPress , and there was a space above it where I pasted in RewriteRule (.+)\.html$ /$1/ [L,R] . Then I pressed ‘save’ and it said ‘Success!’

Does this take time to take effect? ‘cas I searched for my Plato blog post, and it still says “Page not found”

My website had this same problem. I found it easiest to re-submit my sitemap to google. Here are the steps that google suggests:

Submitting your Google Site’s sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools

On your Webmaster Tools home page, select your site.
In the left sidebar, click Site configuration and then Sitemaps.
Click the Add/Test Sitemap button in the top right.
Enter /system/feeds/sitemap into the text box that appears.
Click Submit Sitemap.

Ok. Done this too. Hers’s hoping.
Thanks.
Any other suggestion, I’ll try all possibilities

Well, it’s close to 11 pm on Tuesday, 8/21, and I just received the following email from Google, which seems to suggest that all my efforts so far have failed. PLEASE keep trying to help me find a solution. I really appreciate your help. This message might as well be in Swahili or Martian for all it means to me.

Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 359 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn’t crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site’s overall robots.txt error rate is 47.3%. You can see more details about these errors in Webmaster Tools.

Recommended action
If the site error rate is 100%:

Using a web browser, attempt to access https://www.spirituality-and-religion.com//robots.txt. If you are able to access it from your browser, then your site may be configured to deny access to googlebot. Check the configuration of your firewall and site to ensure that you are not denying access to googlebot.
If your robots.txt is a static page, verify that your web service has proper permissions to access the file.
If your robots.txt is dynamically generated, verify that the scripts that generate the robots.txt are properly configured and have permission to run. Check the logs for your website to see if your scripts are failing, and if so attempt to diagnose the cause of the failure.

If the site error rate is less than 100%:

Using Webmaster Tools, find a day with a high error rate and examine the logs for your web server for that day. Look for errors accessing robots.txt in the logs for that day and fix the causes of those errors.
The most likely explanation is that your site is overloaded. Contact your hosting provider and discuss reconfiguring your web server or adding more resources to your website.

After you think you’ve fixed the problem, use Fetch as Google to fetch https://www.spirituality-and-religion.com//robots.txt to verify that Googlebot can properly access your site.

Actually, I did just notice that a few days ago their message said my error rate was 100%. Now it’s only 47.3%. So maybe I AM making progress.

Hello Cort,
As you imported content from blogger.com to WordPress blog, there are little changes in post slug URLs (like articles:- ‘the’,’a’, ‘an’,etc) in WordPress as mentioned above by Ipstenu (Mika Epstein). WordPress create a post slug as per the post title and blogger.com skip those English “articles”.
Hence To fix such post slug issues in bulk for all the imported posts you just need to run a fix.php file mentioned in this Blogger to WordPress DIY tutorial under the section “Fixing permalinks for imported post“.

Another thing: I found that few other links are not redirecting properly
1. https://www.spirituality-and-religion.com/2011_08_01_archive.html
2. https://www.spirituality-and-religion.com/search/label/crucifixion
3. https://www.spirituality-and-religion.com/feeds/posts/default (very important)

I can suggest you to add some .htacess rules (from the same DIY tutorial ) which will redirect old blogger archives and labels to respective WordPress archives and categories respectively.

Hope this will help you.
Thanks,
–Nitun

good grief. It looks like this will do it. But I can’t make heads or tales of this tutorial. Maybe after a night’s sleep.

If you used WordPress default importer tool to import blogger.com content then that DIY tutorial will definitely help you.