Recovering A Deleted Page Or Post, Chapter 2

Blog owners have been deleting their pages and posts, then changing their minds later, since Blogger started providing the ability to delete pages and posts.

We've been advising anxious blog owners, for some time, how to recover deleted pages and posts. The easiest solution, in the long run, is to recover the PageID / PostID, and re publish the deleted page / post.

When the deleted page or post cannot be re published, the next option is to re build the page / post, possibly using feed cache.

Using this technique, you'll have to reformat the post content, as feed content is formatted relatively simply. When you publish the post, it will publish as a new post, with a new URL - so any external references to the missing post URL will still be broken.

Thanks to the recently offered Custom Redirects option, though, we can make this latter choice slightly less undesirable.

When a deleted page or post has to be rebuilt from the beginning, the classic prognosis was not good.

1. The content is retrieved or rewritten, then re formatted.
2. The page / post is re published, but under a new URL.
3. The readers, and the search engines, adjust to the new URL being used.

For many blog owners, issue #3 is the cruelest blow - as the blog suffers reputation loss, from readers and search engines seeing

404 Not Found

for the deleted page / post.

Given enough determination and time, the blog owner can get through issues #1 and #2 - but issue #3 is the gift that just keeps on giving. Using Custom Redirects, though, that does not have to be the case.

It's a simple solution - and your readers and the search engines don't have to do anything unusual.

1. Rebuild the page / post, using a carefully chosen Title / URL.
2. Add a Custom Redirect.
   • From: The deleted (previously published) URL.
   • To: The new (re published) URL.
3. The readers, and the search engines can view the re built page / post contents using the old URL - and update their record of the URL, as convenient to them, to point to the new URL. And the page / post never goes offline.

And you, the blog owner, can get back to work on new pages and posts.

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Without The PostID, A Deleted Post Is Not Easily Recovered

If you delete a post (page) in your blog, it's a simple matter to recover the post - as long as you know the PostID. Unfortunately, once the post is gone, finding the post (page) id is not a simple matter - especially for those who would typically delete a page or post without planning. Blogger does not provide the PostID in any list, that we might save, periodically, to reference later.

The task of retrieving a deleted page or post is particularly frustrating, for owners of private blogs. Private blogs probably won't be cached, nor do they publish a blog feed - and without either a cache entry, or a feed reference, the PostID for a deleted post is not easily obtained.

Right now, once you delete a page or post, in a private blog, you're out of luck - unless you have cached the blog on your own computer. Retrieving from local cache is not an issue to be productively discussed in Blogger Support, as it is going to be as individual as your computer may be.

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