How to merge two WordPress blogs in one!

As most of you must be knowing that I used to have two active blogs, one which you are reading and the other one was TipsoSaurus. However, I thought that the purpose of TipsoSaurus was to provide tips and tricks on computers, so why not provide them on ReviewSaurus itself!

Well, after this devilish idea came in my mind, I decided to go for it however the bigger trouble was that what will I do to ensure that all the posts gets transferred over to ReviewSaurus from TipsoSaurus and that too without losing the SEO effect.

Here are the steps which I did to ensure that everything went on smoothly :

Steps in TipsoSaurus wordpress installation -

1. Deleted all the categories and only kept the default category.

2. Exported the posts, comments, custom fields, categories through WXR file (extended RSS).

3. Made the backup of the whole database too (just in case).

4. Removed the Sitemap and robots.txt

5. Did the site wide 301 redirect through .htaccess : Well, this is the main step as this was the only step which took some research work but at the end came out to be a single line solution. Here’s what I did -

a) Removed everything from .htaccess and added this line "redirect 301 / http://www.reviewsaurus.com/" (sans quotes).

Steps in ReviewSaurus wordpress installation -

1. Imported the WXR file.

Everything just went fine after that. I’ve noticed that URLs are changing properly in the Google’s Index!