Moving off page blog to on page blog
-
Hi,
I was using free wordpress blog and i have around 18-20 content on the blog. Now, we've managed to have blog on our main website which has www.mysite.com/blog extension. We did this so we could create more links on the website/
I am a little unsure how to move the blog now. Should we copy & paste the blog articles from old blog to new one and remove them from old blog? I am just not quite sure how would it effect the links.
If i keep the old articles on the old blog and create new articles for the new one, it'll take me a while before i get them written.
Any recommendation appreciated.
Thanks
-
Just to make sure you know, Sida - it's possible to migrate a WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted one (like www.mysite.com/blog) and still keep most of the ranking/influence/linkjuice of the original blog flowing to the new site.
It's relatively straightforward to do. The benefit is, you get the best of both worlds - everyone going to the old site gets automatically redirected to the new site, so no concerns about duplicate content, and the ranking value gets passed to the new blog.
This means the new site will have all the old site's content, so it won't look "sparse" at the beginning. It also means all the traffic going to the old site will automatically land on the equivalent page of the new site, so the new blog will immediately have traffic. And as I said, almost all the ranking value of the old site will be moved to the new site as well.
The key requirement to accomplish this is, you MUST buy the Offsite Redirect service from WordPress.com which is what will redirect visitors and linkjuice to the new location. It's only $13/yr last time I checked. (1 yr is often enough)
There are many tutorials on the web for how to do this. Here's a good tutorial from wpbeginners.com and there's a version with a video on Mashable's site. (Iin your case a couple of adjustments will be necessary as you'll be transferring to your blog in a subfolder, not at the root of your site)
In my opinion, if you've got some good incoming links to your existing content on the WordPress.com site, it would be well worth the hour or two necessary to properly migrate it to your new main site blog.
Something to think about?
Paul
-
Hi Tom/John,
Thank you for your time and insightful points.
I've just check the back links that comes to old blog and i have quite few of them and it don't think it will be easy to update them and i do get link juice from the old blog. It may not be good idea to move from old one to new one then.
In this case, it 's better to create a new blog from scratch. One thing that I wasn't happy to do is to sent users to a blog where there are only a few articles. I've just thought that i can create a banner letting users know that the previous entries are available on old blog. I think this will prevent us look we are very new in the business
Thank you again!
-
If you are getting some link juice form the blog, I wouldn't take it down, not in the short term for sure
Can you not start the new blog from a blank canvas, I appreciate you have 18 entries in your current blog, but in the greater scheme its not that much.
You could of course create new similar articles within your new blog, and then eventually redirect your old blog to the new one, that way you retain most of your link juice.
Defiantly do not copy the text ,even if you are taking the pages of the first blog down, just because you remove something from a web server, it does not mean the page is still not indexed, it might be a while before the robots come looking again.
Really I would suggest create the new blog and start from their, as you add similar posts to the new blog as is on the old one, redirect the old post to the new blog.
If you feel you are getting no benefit from the old blog, of course you can reomve it, but I would'nt just copy and past the data to the new blog until you knew it was unindexed, you could use copyscape to verify within a few days because even requesting Google to unindex can take weeks to happen
Regards
John
-
Hey there
Let's run through the two options and look at the pros and cons of each:
Moving content from old blog to new blog - if you do this, the first thing you'll want to do is remove the old content from the old blog, as you mentioned. This is to remove any chance of a duplicate content penalty.
Now, the links to your site from your old blog (plus any links to those blog posts) will be lost. You will know better than anyone if those links are high value or if they are nice authoritative links. You'd be losing those links in this method, but even if they were high quality I would be tempted to use this method anyway.
By having the blog content directly on your root domain, there's nothing stopping from high authority websites linking to those posts in the future, particularly if the content is timeless. That means you'd be getting the benefit of those links directly to your site.
As a contingency, if you find any links pointing to your old blog and would like to keep them, reaching out to the webmaster who owns the site is a good idea. I'm sure they'd be keen on not sending their own users to a 404 page as it makes them look bad. Tell them you've updated the URL and you can keep the link.
As for the other option - keeping the old blog and starting fresh with the new one. This will make your new blog appear sparse at first, which isn't that bad of a thing and certainly not from an SEO perspective. You'd be keeping the links from the old blog to your site in this sense, but the only problem is that if people want to link to your old blog posts, you're not getting the direct benefit of that to your new domain. The strength of that link will be diluted somewhat.
On a personal note, I always prefer keeping your content on your main site for contingency reasons anyway. I want my site, or whichever site I'm working on, to be the number 1 stop for users looking for information, resources, tools, advice etc. For that reason, I'd go with option one and take the necessary steps outlined above.
Hope this 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
-
Links to deep pages good for Homepage ranking?
Hello Moz community. My question today is: if I got great backlinks with anchor text "abc" coming to a deep resource page in my site, will these links help my homepage rank for keyword "xyz"? In other words, are all links (regarless of anchor text) coming to a site helpful for the homepage to rank for its main keyword? Thanks.
Link Building | | EduardoRuiz0 -
Need advices for my first and new blog. to do and not to do!
the increase traffic to my online store furnacefilterscanada.com I'm working on a new blog on a different domain. mervrating.org I found a good writer and will ask for good content to post on my blog. The content will be about a specific keywors relevant to my business. about each post, should they always have a link to my online store? when a guest is posting a comment on my blog and leaving is url, should I ask him if I can comment on is site to get backlink? what are the best things do to about using my blog to help my store rank better? how about on 'How to optomize' a certain keyword, can you give a example on how it is use in a blog and how it should link to the site you want to increase traffic? I guess if my blog can built high page and domain authority and it is linking to my online store often, it will help my store gain a higher PA and DA? Can it hurt if every post is linking to my store? last question, if guest comment and leave url and my site has a good D.A. it will be help full to them, but want about me? Is there a way to take advantage of this? I hope I can get help crom Mozers the me start my new blog with the best guideline and tips to make it a success. Thank you
Link Building | | BigBlaze2050 -
Same Page, Multiple URLS- Canonical tag? Redirect?
I just read this article about how google views multiple versions of the same page as different pages of duplicate content. My website, www.telikin.com currently has many versions of the home page. There is: www.telikin.com
Link Building | | Telikin
www.telikin.com/index
www.telikin.com/index.php
www.telikin.com/index.php/ All of these seem to be their own URLS, If i use the open site explorer tool to search for links pointing to these URLS, the www.telikin.com domain shows about 700 links, and the www.telikin.com/index.php shows about 63 links. My questions: Is my SEO suffering as a result of having these different pages? Does google realize that links pointing to www.telikin.com/index.php should count towards the seo of the www.telikin.com page? If this is hurting my company's website, how do I solve this problem? I am not versed as a webmaster, so I don't understand what the best course of action would be. Should I request that our webmaster somehow redirects all traffic from the other URLS to the main www.telikin.com URL? Should I be using canonical tags on all important pages? If i do, for example, use a canonical tag on the www.telikin.com page, will Google then know to send all link juice from the www.telikin.com/index.php page to the www.telikin.com page? We also have a Joomla blog that seems to duplicate pages many times over, but that is a problem that I will have to address another time. Any comments/suggestions are more than welcome. Thanks, Dave0 -
Classified Sites Ranking on Page 1
How is it that Craigslist, and Backpage get a boost from google and take over 1 or more of the page one results in my niche? Ive also seen people ask a yahoo question, and answer with a link to their website? Are these just temporary boosts?
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Better to redirect domain or to link from home page?
Hi, I have a niche directory and sometimes clients remove themselves because they have discontinued their business practice. If they sometimes provide me with their own website (as they will no longer use it either), is it wiser for me to: a) directly point their URL 301 to my own directory b) keep their website as is, and add a url link to my directory in their homepage c) keep their website as is, and add an anchored link with the industry keyword to my directory Thanks! D
Link Building | | Demosthenes0 -
Link value personal pages on .edu
Many .edu colleges and universities provide students and alum a free hosting service. Here's an example: http://homepages.cae.wisc.edu/~dwilson/homepage.shtml According to SEOmoz bar, the PA=53 and DA=94. What is the banklink value from a page like this? Surely this is not the same as a backlink from www.wisc.edu, is it? Best,
Link Building | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
No-Follow links on clients blog?
I have a client who has a blog with a side bar on each page, in the sidebar there are various links to the site, as well as links to some of his partner sites. I was looking at the recently updated open site explorer, and noticing that their domain authority is way down, a good amount below their competitors as well. The total links compared to the linking root domains is ~3000 to 200. So my question is 1. How can I gain on the domain authority front? (more diverse links?) And if so, 2. Should I no-follow the links on their blog so they don't have hundreds of pages with the same links (most internal) on there site Thanks,
Link Building | | USHoleInOne
Nick0 -
Other than the homepage, what other pages need linkbuilding TLC?
With my linkbuilding efforts, I know what keywords I want to target but my homepage ranks for most of my keywords. The other pages were written and built for specific keywords, but do they need linkbuilding TLC? They don't rank in the SERPs much anyway (if not at all) and the homepage is by-far the strongest in the SERPs.
Link Building | | Bill4Time0