How to transfer old WP blog to new URL
-
I have a 9 year old WP website with a WP blog which is still getting 300+ new visitors a day even though I have not written a blog for 5 years and have not updated content. Some posts have over 25,000 links.
However the Moz analytics is fraught with significant errors-404 redirects, page not found, dup content, no metatags, title too long etc. I was totally inexperienced 5 years ago and made many errors. However the basic content was sound and still is producing new visitors.
I am starting a new ecommerce website using the same name but the URL and server will be different. I want to transfer my WP blog to the new site. I am concerned however that bringing the posts over can create the same errors on the new site.
If I update all of the blogs on the old site using Yoast before transferring the blog to the new site will that help. I suppose I could check those flagged dup content and only transfer one of that category?
-
Jane,
Thank you very much. This is the second time you have helped me!
Thanks
Brooke
-
Hi there,
Check out Wordpress's page on importing old content as well. The Wordpress information is towards the bottom of the page (there are instructions for a bunch of other blogging platforms). As jStrong said, this will be easier if you are importing to a new Wordpress installation rather than to a different CMS.
-
Thank you very much-you have given me hope!!!
-
Hello,
If you are moving the content to another wordpress install there are plugins that will help make the move easier. You could work on cleaning up the 404s and meta errors before you move the site, but in my experience migrations sometimes to do not bring the content over 'cleanly'. If you can move the content to the new site and work on it before the site is launched, I think that would be ideal. Especially if the URLs are going to be different, move the content then work on cleaning it all up. It's just easier to do this way IMO since you can see how it will all look beforehand. And yes, depending on the tool you use to aid in the migration, I would try and only bring over good content, not duplicates and broken pages. Also make sure you get all your redirects in order. If this is a large site that has a lot of traffic, mapping all the redirects to new URLs will be key.
Hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
URL keyword separator best practice
Hello. Wanted to reach out see what the consensus is re-keyword separators So just taken on a new client and all their urls are structured like /buybbqpacks rather than buy-bbq-packs - my understanding is that it comes down to readability, which influences click through, rather than search impact on the keyword. So we usually advise on a hyphen, but the guy's going to have to change ALLOT of pages & setup redirects to change it all wasn't sure if it was worth it? Thanks! Stu
On-Page Optimization | | bloomletsgrow0 -
URL for a new website
Hi, I am creating a new website for a client. Is it best to include the keywords from the most common search in the domain name, they would like: forenamesurname.com but should I be recommending: weddingmakeupbyforename.com Does it make much difference to search rankings if the keyword is in the domain name? Thanks v much
On-Page Optimization | | danieldunn100 -
URL Question
This url looks bad: http://www.patrickmunoz.com/#!classes/c1vw1 And when you click around the page change doesn't actually occur, it's a fade into the next page. I think this is a major problem for rankings. Although pages are crawled: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.patrickmunoz.com%2F&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j69i58j69i59l3j69i61.3548j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8 When I search for a simple page - "patrick munoz FAQs" nothing comes up:
On-Page Optimization | | tylerfraser
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.patrickmunoz.com%2F&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j69i58j69i59l3j69i61.3548j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8#q=patrick+munoz+|+FAQs Do you think this is a bad url configuration? Thanks! Tyler0 -
Our urls for adwords are slightly different from current urls presented on site (weused htaccess to help create shorter urls). How important is it that the adwords url match the sitemap url for keywords on those pages?
Hello, We have dynamic urls that we have made into short urls through htaccess and code manipulation. Some of our adwords urls are different from our page urls - for example a) Latest version of page www.abc.com/x-y-z.html b) Previous version of url www.abc.com/x+y+z.html c) raw original version www.abc.com/yyy/zzz?category=X&Product-code=Y etc etc. Would my ranking for keywords on the page improve if I diligently made all of them the same? They all go to the same page even now, and no 404 errors or anything. Thanks Sam
On-Page Optimization | | samgold0 -
Why does Google show old title?
I made some changes to title tags on a clients site over a month ago. Google has since crawled all the pages that the changes were made to. Here's the problem. For some of the pages, the old title is still showing in search results. Why does Google do this? 2) What can I do about it?
On-Page Optimization | | eli.boda0 -
Exponentially Increasing Duplicate Content On Blogs
Most of the clients that I pick up are either new to SEO best practices, or have worked with sketchy SEO providers in the past, who did little more than build spammy links. Most of them have deployed little if any on-site SEO best practices, and early on I spend a lot of time fixing canonical and duplicate content issues alla 301 redirects. Using SEOMOZ, however, I see a lot of duplicate content issues with blogs that live on the sites I work on. With every new blog article we publish, more duplicate content builds up. I feel like duplicate content on blogs grows exponentially, because every time you write a blog article, it exists provisionally on the blog homepage, the article link, a category page, maybe a tag page, and an author page. I have a two-part question: Is duplicate content like this a problem for a blog -- and for the website that the blog lives on? Are search engines able to parse out that this isn't really duplicate content? If it is a problem, how would you go about solving it? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
Blog content on homepage - Dupe Content Penalty?
Hi All, I am working on a website which has a blog at domain.com/blog/ On the homepage they are currently looping the latest 5 blog posts in a 'Latest News' tab. Is this therefore classed as dupe content, and would this be penalized by Google? Should I recommend they use the excerpts instead of full articles and simply loop the excerpts on the homepage? The website is built on WordPress. Thanks, Woody
On-Page Optimization | | seowoody1 -
Site URL's
We are redeveloping our website, and have the option to amend URLs (with 301 redirects from old URL to new), so my question is: Would 'golfsite.com/golf-clubs' achieve superior rankings than 'golfsite.com/clubs' for the search term 'golf clubs' if all other factors were the same? Should the URL reflect the intended search term wherever possible?
On-Page Optimization | | swgolf1230