Moving site from html to Wordpress site: Should I port all old pages and redirect?
-
Any help would be appreciated.
I am porting an old legacy .html site, which has about 500,000 visitors/month and over 10,000 pages to a new custom Wordpress site with a responsive design (long overdue, of course) that has been written and only needs a few finishing touches, and which includes many database features to generate new pages that did not previously exist.
My questions are:
-
Should I bother to port over older pages that are "thin" and have no incoming links, such that reworking them would take time away from the need to port quickly?
-
I will be restructuring the legacy URLs to be lean and clean, so 301 redirects will be necessary. I know that there will be link juice loss, but how long does it usually take for the redirects to "take hold?" I will be moving to https at the same time to avoid yet another porting issue.
Many thanks for any advice and opinions as I embark on this massive data entry project.
-
-
I recently did something similar and left behind a bunch of "thin" pages, just be sure to check your internal links to make sure you are not linking to a page you are 404ing. [Screaming Frog is great for this—if you don't have it, you should get it.] You can always "revive" any that you see a lot of people trying to reach. My redirects took hold quickly—I couldn't even say how long, it was that fast. [Mine was an old domain and frequently crawled.] Good luck!
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
-
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect?
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect? If this scenario requires a 301 redirect no matter what, I might as well update the URL to be a little more keyword rich for the page while I'm at it. However, since these pages are ranking well I'd rather not lose any authority in the process and keep the URL just stripped of the ".html" (if that's possible). Thanks for you help! [edited for formatting]
Technical SEO | | Booj0 -
Site Penalized - 301 Redirect Question
Hello, We have a website that was penalized roughly two years by Google for "Unnatural Links"... We are experiencing a lot of problems with this site, completely unrelated to the penalty or SERPS, and we're debating doing a 301 Re-direct to another site we own that is totally clean and has no "Unnatural Links". If we do a 301 from the penalized site to our alternative website, will there be any cross-contamination? Will the penalty carry over to our other site? Please let me know what you guys think. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
301 redirect new site design
Hi I'm just setting up some 301 redirects for a new site design about to go live. The old site structure had some 'overview' pages in the urls (without any content) that just 302'd to a sub page. Do i need 301 redirect these overview page urls or since they had no content theres no need and I probably shouldn't or should i ? Also for pages that have no direct equivalent replacement is it still best to 301 to nearest relevant page or just leave it. For example a thank you page that currently shows after user submits email form wont be on new site (since message shows on form page after submission rather than new page). Should i 301 to form page or just leave it ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Best way to retain banklink values when moving site?
Hi all, I want to get some opinions on what the best practice is when transferring backlink values from an old site to a new one. On the old site, I currently have a product page and this particular product has multiple models all listed on the one singe page. However on the new site, every model of this particular product has its own page. These product model pages would have relatively similar content apart from several key details which differentiates the models. Firstly would you guys recommend this splitting of models of the same product to different pages? If so, my initial thought process is to 301 redirect the old product page to the new model page that is most popular, and adding rel canonical tags to the other model pages. Would you consider this best practice? Or are there better ways I can be doing this to retain backlink values without also getting penalised due to possible content duplication? Thanks! Jac - sent from my manager's account.
Technical SEO | | RuchirP0 -
Does it matter if I leave image links pointing to old site when I move a wordpress blog?
Hi everyone I am moving a blog from one site to another. I have all the 301 redirects etc under control, but my question has to do with image links in the blogs. The image links all point over to the old site once the posts are copied over. Is this a major problem from an SEO perspective? Lots of links pointing out to an old site? It won't matter from the users perspective as I have 'none' for the image URL, so the user will never know. I will reload all the images if necessary but boy that will be a lot of work. Or is there a shortcut? Thanks very much Wendy
Technical SEO | | Chammy0 -
Redirecting over-optimised pages
Hi One of my clients websites was affected by Penguin and due to no 'bad link' messages, and nothing really obvious from the backlink profile, I put it down to over-optimisation on the site. I noticed a lot of spammy pages and duplicate content, and submitted recommendations to have these fixed. They dragged their heels for a while and eventually put in plans for a new site (which was happening anyway), but its taken quite a while and is only just going live in a couple of weeks. My question is, should I redirect the URLs of the previously over-optimised pages? Obviously the new pages are nice and clean and from what I can tell there are no bad links pointing to the URLs, so is this an acceptable practice? Will Google notice this and remove the penalty? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Duplicate Page Title for Wordpress
Hello, We are using WP for our blog and keep getting Dup Page Title errors for our 12 author archives pages. The title of each page is the same, but I am wondering if this is WP issue with canonicalization working properly. The most recent four pages have a linking root domain and carry some Page Authority, but the older pages do not. Is this what Rand was talking about in his Google+ whiteboard Friday talk about blog post relevancy not lasting as long as articles? Here's what it looks like. Side question, is there a reason why the SEO Moz website doesn't have a Google+ button anywhere easy to find? Thank you, Michael
Technical SEO | | MKaloud1 -
What do you do about links to constantly moving pages?
One of the sites I work for is an employment site, they have a job database and the job pages tend to get links. The problem is that every time one of these jobs is filled, the job page goes away. What should I do to keep the value from these links?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0