Changing all urls

[DoMiSoL]

A client of mine has a wordpress website that is installed in a directory, called "site".

So when you go to www.domain.com you are redirected to www.domain.com/site.

We all know how bad it is to have a redirect fron your subdomain to another page. In this case I measured a loss of 5 points of page authority.

The question is: what is the best practice to remove the "site" from the address and changing all the urls?

• Should I use the webmaster tool to tell to Google that the site is moving? It's not 100% true, cause the site is just moving one level up.
• Should I install a copy of the website under www.domain.com and just redirect 301 every old page to its new url? This way I think the site would be deindexet for 2/3 months.

Any suggestions or tips welcome!

Thanks DoMiSol

[NCMM]

A pleasure! In answer to your questions:

1. there is a slight risk of a temporary blip, but assuming you do everything correctly at the same time, the transfer should be seamless and any ranking changes minimal and very temporary.
2. Not as far as I know. Changing the permalink structure doesn't cause 301-redirects to be put in place so you will need to do that separately. You could do that in the htaccess file or you could use a plug-in. We like to use John Godley's Redirection Plug-In or there is another here.

Best of luck.

[DoMiSoL]

Thank you Nick.

I have 2 more questions:

1. Do you think that doing this I risk any ranking drop? If so, how big and for how long?

2. Will Wordpress internal links work just the same? I mean should I only strip the "site" from the Wordpress URL in the General Settings of Wordpress?

Thank you again,

DoMiSol

[NCMM]

I believe you will be best to do two things:

1. put in place a global 301 rule to redirect any URL with /site/ in it to the same without /site/. If the site is hosted on Apache this is relatively easy to do in htaccess if you get your commands right. You can destroy a site if you're not careful though...so take care. If you don't know htaccess find someone close by who does!
2. re-configure the root directory of the domain on the server to point at the sub-directory directly. Using e.g. Plesk and command line this is pretty trivial to do. This will have the effect of the server retrieving content directly from the sub-directory...if you set it up correctly it will be as if /site/ doesn't exist.

You will need to do these both at the same time, and assuming you get it all right there shouldn't be any interruption in service, although there will be a period when a mixture of /site/ and non-/site/ URLs are indexed.

Installing another copy of the site is fraught with risk as you could end up with a serious duplicate content problem, ranking drops etc....far simpler to reconfigure the server and domain.