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
-
Best way to handle URLs of the to-be-translated pages on a multilingual site
Dear Moz community, I have a multilingual site and there are pages with content that is supposed to be translated but for now is English only. The structure of the site is such that different languages have their virtual subdirs: domain.com/en/page1.html for English, domain.com/fr/page1.html for French and so on. Obviously, if the page1.html is not translated, the URLs point to the same content and I get warnings about duplicate content. I see two ways to handle this situation: Break the naming scheme and link to original English pages, i.e. instead of domain.com/fr/index.html linking to domain.com/fr/page1.html link to domain.com/en/page.html Leave the naming scheme intact and set up a 301 redirect so that /fr/page1.html redirects to /en/page1.html Is there any difference for the two methods from the SEO standpoint? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Lomar0 -
How to redirect old domain to new domain.
We just recently signed up to Moz with hopes of fixing our Moz Ranking. We have an old domain - http://at-net.net and a new domain - https://www.expertip.net We have set up 301 (Permanent) redirects from all pages on the old site to the new, but aren't getting the ranking or aren't getting recognized from external links to the old sites. I've read the moz article on 'Link Juice' and followed those practices, but it doesn't seem to help. Does anyone have advice on doing this? Thanks in advance,
Technical SEO | | greg.lanier
Greg0 -
How to redirect 302 status to 301 status code using wordpress
I just ran the link opportunity option within site explorer and it shows that 31 pages are currently in a 302 status. Should I try to convert the 302's to 301's? And what is the easiest way to do this? I see several wordpress plugins that claim to do 301 redirects but I don't know which to choose. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | vmsolu0 -
Page Juice not moving???
Moved URL's from ldnwicklesscandles.com to ldnwicklesscandles.co.uk because I wanted to rank better for UK where I'm located and thought also the .co.uk for my competitors may have been giving them the advantage. Use Squarespace 7 (transferred over from SS5)----they told me to set primary domain to .co.uk and I've done it. I've also done a 301 redirect and done a change of address in webmaster tools although I'm not sure if all of this is needed? Squarespace seem to think just setting the primary domain is enough. My question is its been a couple of weeks, I've resubmited to Google webmaster to try to speed things up, the new URL is appearing in Google but none of my Page Juice seems to be transferring yet? How long will it take? I know not all the juice will move over but my PA/DA is non existent now and I have no idea if I'm just being impatient or I've done something wrong here. Not a Pro, Just a small biz owner here so forgive me if this has been asked before.
Technical SEO | | ldnwickless0 -
Wordpress Page vs. Posts
My campaigns are telling me I have some duplicate content. I know the reason but not sure how to correct it. Example site here: Bikers Blog is a "static page" referencing each actual "blog post" I write. This site is somewhat orphaned and about to be reconstituted. I have a number of other sites with a similar problem. I'm not sure how to structure the "page" so it only shows a summary of the blog post on the page not the whole post. Permalinks is set as "/%postname%/" I've posted on Wordpress.org with no answer. Since this is an SEO issue I thought maybe someone with WP experience could chime in. Thanks, Don
Technical SEO | | NicheGuy0 -
Discontinuing a site & Redirecting Traffic to an Internal Page
We are wondering the best way to redirect the traffic from a site that will no longer exist. The Scenario:
Technical SEO | | TopFloor
Our client wants to discontinue this website http://www.animalcarepackaging.com/. We’d like to redirect the traffic from this site to an internal page on our client's other website: http://www.glenroy.com/packaging/. This internal page is the most appropriate to the content that appears on animalcarepackaging.com (as opposed to just the entire site glenroy.com). Possible Options We Are Considering:
Option 1: Keep hosting animalcarepackaging.com and add a 301 redirect for all pages to glenroy.com/packaging/. Our concern with this option is that Google/Bing will see animalcarepackaging.com as a gateway, which could hurt glenroy.com. Option 2: Keep hosting animalcarepackaging.com and add a 301 redirect so all pages are sent to glenroy.com/packaging/; AND file a change of address with Google and Bing. We believe this will allow people who have bookmarked animalcarepackaging.com to go to glenroy.com/packaging/; while people searching for animalcarepackaging.com will go to glenroy.com's home page. We would augment this by posting a message on the homepage of animalcarepackaging.com notifiying users that the site will be discontinued and info will be found at glenroy.com/packaging. Option 3: Do a change of address with Google/Bing and send all traffic to glenroy.com (rather than an internal page). Post information on the homepage of animalcarepackaging.com that the site will be discontinued on X-date, and info about animalcarepackaging.com will be able to be found at glenroy.com/packaging. Looking for feedback on our options and suggestions on how this can be handled.0 -
H1 - site name or page title?
Hi all, I have always used h1 tags for the site name and then h2 tags for the page title, thus: Bob's Chunky Bacon Store Smoked Bacon Bacon bacon bacon bacon etc... My reasoning for this is I believe it is semantically correct. The h1 represents a book's title and the h2 the name of a chapter. I seem to have read, in a few places, that my h1 should be the page title: Bob's Chunky Bacon Store Smoked Bacon Bacon bacon bacon bacon etc... From a SEO view, which of these is the better approach? Thanks in advance for any input.
Technical SEO | | jimneath0 -
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
