Are backlinks lost when the url is changed? Please advise on how switching from blogger to wordpress will affect by seo.
The domain name change will definitely hurt your search engine ranking. I guess it is not possible to setup redirects from blogger to your new domain name.
If you were using your own domain name for blogger and are using that same name, it will not change much. However, if you were using the blogger subdomain, you will lose all backlinks when you change domains. It will be like starting a brand new blog. If you do a redirect as suggested above, it will show up as fake PR and could cause problems if you are tryin g to sell links or blog posts to people.
Redirects are totally legitimate since you redirect your own content. This is what redirects are used for. The 301 HTTP redirects mean "301 Moved Permanently". This is from RFC: "The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs..." This is what you should do when you move your site to a new address. However, I don't think this is possible on blogger. This is the price you pay for the free blog hosting.
They may be legit, however, the PR will show as faked on most PR checkers because of the redirect. The only real reason to be concerned about PR is for link sales or selling post so the possible buyer will see the PR as faked and will not want to purchase it. The other issue is that the PR juice will not carry from the new blog to the person's site who bought the links.
I don't know what fake PR is. For me PR is the rank shown in a Google Toolbar. Adam Lasnik of Google said "301s pass PR and related signals appropriately. Usually takes a couple of weeks for things to smooth out, though. " http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/6c68becb3dc27fa6/70286ab20939b527?lnk=gst&q=&rnum=12#70286ab20939b527 Yahoo also favors redirects: "When a page in one domain redirects to a page in another domain, Yahoo! records the "target" URL." http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/webcrawler/slurp-11.html And I found some solution on that Yahoo page about redirects that might work for your blogger blog. You can try the <meta http-equiv="refresh" content=...> redirects with a time setting of 0. They seem to work as 301 redirects as well.