Yahoo to Wordpress Permalinks
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I have had a yahoo site for a couple of years. I want to start blogging so I had a worpress site built. After the site was build I noticed the urls from the previous site were not the same. For example www.besthomecaremn.com/about_us is now www.besthomecaremn.com/index-php/about_us. The company working on the site told me that that yahoo did not support permalinks and they could not make them match exactly. This is a problem because several of my pages rank differently for different terms: /about_us, /employees, /clients, /contact_us, etc, all rank differently. When they came up in the search results and were clicked on you were taken to the old site so it was like we had two sites. The company has now set that to send you to a page that says this page under routine maintenence. They are basically telling me they cannot make the urls for those pages stay the same. I am very frustrated and don't really know what to do at this point. Are they right? Can it really not be done? Can those pages alternatively be set to redirect to the new page urls or will that negatively affect the rank for those pages and how? Should I have them put the old site back up and swith hosting companies? Any advice on what to do in this situation is greatly appreciated.
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You can definitely define permalinks in Wordpress. Now there could be some other issues going on, but one of the easy thing about Wordpress (from an SEO-perspective) is defining those permalinks.
I'm sure why everything's under /index.php/. It seems like something is not installed or set-up correctly.
If something else, you'll need to set up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. Yes, you'll lose some of your link juice and your URL structure as it is on the new site is not as strong.
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