How to move blog to new domain with different theme & categories
-
I have a wordpress blog hosted on a separate domain. I have a new empty blog on a subdomain of my-commerce main site. The new blog has a different wordpress theme & categories than the old blog.
What is a good way to populate the new blog with content from the old?
What do I do with the old blog once the move is done?
Thank you for your thoughts on this
Handcrafter
-
Hi Stephen,
That's part of the syntax used to transfer a site URL-by-URL - what the entire snippet of code means is that a browser or search engine will come across www.oldblog.com/post123.html and immediately be taken to blog.newdomaincom/post123.html. If you are not using the same URLs on the new blog, you won't need to or be able to use this particular function in your .htaccess file.
You say that "the new blog has a different wordpress theme & categories than the old blog" which makes me think you'll need to redirect category URLs separately at least (I must have missed that line when I read the question at first; apologies).
Once you've redirected everything, you will need to keep the old domain. If you let it lapse or sell it, the redirects will no longer work unfortunately.
-
Thank you Jane-
Can you tell me what the "Options +FollowSymLinks" is for?
And by the way, after everything is 301'd would you keep the old site hosted forever?
Best wishes
Stephen
-
Hi there,
This should be fairly easy as it's Wordpress to Wordpress. Does this page answer the question properly for you? https://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content
You will want to 301 redirect the old blog to the new one once you are done, ensuring that this is done on a page by page basis (e.g. www.oldblog.com/post123.html redirects to blog.newdomaincom/post123.html).
You will probably need to do this in your .htaccess file if the site is hosted on an Apache server. It will probably look like this:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
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
-
Domain authority a better metric then referring domain count?
Hi Guys, When reviewing competitors what would be a better metric - Referring domain count OR domain authority. From my understanding DA is a indication of the quality of the link profile. So if a site has a high DA this is a better metric for comparison then referring domain count. What are your thoughts on this? Cheers/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
Website can't break into Google Top100 for main keywords, considering 301 Redirect to a new domain
A little background on our case. Our website, ex: http://ourwebsite.com was officially live in December 2015 but it wasn't On-Site optimized and we haven't done any Off-site SEO to it. In April we decided to do a small redesign and we did it an online development server. Unfortunately, the developers didn't disallow crawlers and the website got indexed while we were developing it on the development server. The development version that got indexed in Google was http://dev.web.com/ourwebsite We learned that it got indexed when we migrated the new redesigned website to the initial domain. When we did the migration we decided to add www and now it looks like: http://www.ourwebsite.com Meanwhile, we deleted the development version from the development server and submitted "Remove outdated content" from the development server's Search Console. This was back in early May. It took about 15-20 days for the development version to get de-indexed and around 30 days for the original website (http://www.ourwebsite.com) to get indexed. Since then we have started our SEO campaign with Press Releases, Outreach to bloggers for Guest and Sponsored Posts etc. The website currently has 55 Backlinks from 44 Referring domains (ahrefs: UR25, DR37) moz DA:6 PA:1 with various anchor text. We are tracking our main keywords and our brand keyword in the SERPs and for our brand keyword we are position #10 in Google, but for the rest of the main (money) keywords we are not in the Top 100 results in Google. It is very frustrating to see no movement in the rankings for the past couple of months and our bosses are demanding rankings and traffic. We are currently exploring the option of using another similar domain of ours and doing a complete 301 Redirect from the original http://www.ourwebsite.com to http://www.ournewebsite.com Does this sound like a good option to you? If we do the 301 Redirect, will the link-juice be passed from the backlinks that we already have from the referring domains to the new domain? Or because the site seems "stuck," would it not pass any power to the new domain? Also, please share any other suggestions that we might use to at least break into the Top 100 results in Google? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielGorsky0 -
Process for moving existing articles to new structure (URLs, titles, etc)
I am in the midst of a major redesign of my site, including revamping existing articles . I have a couple of hundred articles and I am reviewing all aspects of these articles, including titles, URLs, content, etc. I am putting together a process as I move each article across to the new site and have SEO very much in mind. I'd appreciate any feedback on this. First off, let me be clear that I consider the quality of the content paramount. Anything suggested below is considered "supporting" (that content) from an SEO perspective. But, since I am moving this content across, I may as well take the opportunity to clean things up. The existing articles don't have particularly good SEO-related attributes, in terms of their titles, URLs, use of keywords and so on. So, I plan to do the following for each article. For illustrative purposes (our site serves the wedding industry), I will use an article about how to involve children at a wedding. Questionsunder each bullet. Use the "Keyword Difficulty" feature on Moz Pro to research a specific keyword for each article. In the example case I used "involving children in our wedding". Honestly, I am not really sure what to do with this feature 🙂 I've read everything from "focus on the long tail" to "don't fear highly competitive keywords". So, my current thinking is merely to use it as interesting information for they keyword I choose but not actually make any specific decisions from that ie. make sure the keyword is relevant to the article as the first priority and use the tool to check out search volume. Not sure what I should read into a zero for recent Bing searches. Is that really an important factor? I'm assuming the Google information is not available from Google (it would be displayed here otherwise, I'm guessing) Use a title that uses these keywords. In this case, I simply went with "Involving children in our wedding". Same for URL - /wedding-guests/involving-children-in-our-wedding If I have a reasonable, short and human-friendly term like this (I can do this with virtually every article quite easily), is there any reason why the URL and the title should not be the same? In short, the title and URL are both a relatively concise "mini-sentence" Make sure the meta description of the article is easy-to-read (for humans) and uses the keyword (sentence) Make sure that the theme (we are moving to WordPress) uses H1 for the page header/title and H2 for sections within the document Implement 301 redirects from the old URL (old site) to the new URL This seems like a pretty obvious approach for articles where the URL has changed (which will be most of them). But what do I do with articles that I am going to remove. Should I redirect (301) to a related article (so at least the visitor ends up on a page that is generally relevant) or just let this "fall through" as a non-existent page (401)? As I say, I have 200+ articles to go through I want to make sure I am taking this advantage to clean things up. Anything leaping out as missing/problematic? Thanks in advance Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Moving to a new site while keeping old site live
For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know. I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this? Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good? Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses? Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
Difference in Number of URLS in "Crawl, Sitemaps" & "Index Status" in Webmaster Tools, NORMAL?
Greetings MOZ Community: Webmaster Tools under "Index Status" shows 850 URLs indexed for our website (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). The number of URLs indexed jumped by around 175 around June 10th, shortly after we launched a new version of our website. No new URLs were added to the site upgrade. Under Webmaster Tools under "Crawl, Site maps", it shows 637 pages submitted and 599 indexed. Prior to June 6th there was not a significant difference in the number of pages shown between the "Index Status" and "Crawl. Site Maps". Now there is a differential of 175. The 850 URLs in "Index Status" is equal to the number of URLs in the MOZ domain crawl report I ran yesterday. Since this differential developed, ranking has declined sharply. Perhaps I am hit by the new version of Panda, but Google indexing junk pages (if that is in fact happening) could have something to do with it. Is this differential between the number of URLs shown in "Index Status" and "Crawl, Sitemaps" normal? I am attaching Images of the two screens from Webmaster Tools as well as the MOZ crawl to illustrate what has occurred. My developer seems stumped by this. He has submitted a removal request for the 175 URLs to Google, but they remain in the index. Any suggestions? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Root domain or sub domain? WWW. or NOT WWW......
I am a little confused! I use vidahost whom I have to say I find very helpful. I currently have the domains www.fentonit.co.uk and www.fentonit.com, now the websites was set up using the www.fentonit.com and I have www.fentonit.co.uk as a parked domain pointed to the www.fentonit.com. Confused yet? Now because I wanted the website to show www.fentonit.co.uk I added some code I was given by the guys to the .hta access file and viola up it comes as the .co.uk which is what I wanted. So if your still here and havent A: Killed yourself yet or B: Went to the Pub Then my questions are: 1. Is there going to be an issue from an SEO point of view having my site set up this way and if so how do I resolve it? 2. Would I be better using the root domain fentonit.co.uk (I think this is the root domain, although it iscurrently parked and pointed) as opposed to the sub www domain?.......and finally.......? 3. If it is set up as I stated what exactly would be my root domain, would it be the .co.uk or the .com? Sorry and I completely understand if your not interested in answering it but if you do.....Thanks in advance and I'll take you to the pub...lol Craig www.fentonit.co.uk ( i think)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | craigyboy1 -
Can I Use Cross Domain Canonical For Duplicate Categories & Product Pages?
I want to fix issue regarding duplicate categories & product pages on my multiple eCommerce websites. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas-fiberbuilt-umbrellas-llc-7gcrw-teal.html - Want to rank with this... http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/patio-umbrellas-fiberbuilt-umbrellas-llc-7gcrw-teal.html - Duplicate one! http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas - Want to rank with this... http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/patio-umbrellas - Duplicate one!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Redirecting One Page of Content on Domain A to Domain B
Let's say I have a nice page of content on Domain A, which is a strong domain. That page has a nice number of links from other websites and ranks on the first page of the SERPs for some good keywords. However, I would like to move that single page of content to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Domain B is a slightly weaker domain, however, it has better assets to monetize the traffic that visits this page of content. I expect that the rankings might slip down a few places but I am hoping that I will at least keep some of the credit for the inbound links from other websites. Has anyone ever done this? Did it work as you expected? Did the content hold its rankings after being moved? Any advice or philosophical opinions on this? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL2