Website Migration - remove unnecessary sub-folder?

[aj613]

Rebuilding a site that currently has good rankings.  The original site was build in Joomla. I am doing the rebuild on WordPress.  The old site is at the domain www.savannah-dentist.com, but clicking on any link generates a url with a subfolder; i.e. the website is at www.savannah-dentist.com, click on the logo and you will go to www.savannah-dentist.com/rosenthal/, the "meet the doctors" link goes to "www.savannah-dentist.com/rosenthal/meet-the-doctors"

When I rebuild the site, do I have to retain that url structure?

If I get rid of the folder and make everything simply like www.savannah-dentist.com/meet-the-doctors, will I be jeopardizing our rankings?

Thanks!

-Adam

[David-Kley]

301 the old links to the new linking structure. If it is already a high ranking page, the link weight should carry through.

Since it already ranks high, I would keep as many elements as you can the same, unless they dont rank well and need to be improved. Make sure to do a site search for indexed pages, and redirect or create a removal request for any unatural cms-generated links. (component/SAMPLE/123456 etc)

DO NOT just delete the entire folder without seeing how many on page links still link to those pages. Check your on-page links to see if it is generated by the menu system, or if is hard-coded in the content.

Wordpress also has a few items you will want to change in the robots.txt file vs the old Joomla site.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /xmlrpc.php
Disallow: /wp-
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins

or you could also use this one:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /archives/ disallow: /?
Disallow: ?replytocom Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /author
Disallow: /comments/feed/
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Allow: /

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your new build.

[TheeDigital]

If the folder is there for no reason, get rid of it.  Rewrite out the entire directory.  Try this:

In the .htaccess add:

Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews

Turn mod_rewrite on

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^rosenthal/(.*)$ /$1 [L,NC,R=301]

[alrockn]

You can 301 to any place, so if it's beneficial to change the structure the site, now's the time to do it.  Beware though, when you change the structure of the website, and are placing pages in different folders, you're changing the URL, so it will affect your ranking, hopefully for the positive.   I think what you're proposing would be an improvement.