Want to move site to wordpress and keep links without using redicrects
-
I have an old cluny site that has been around for about 56 years. It is on the homestead platform. I want to move the site to a thesis theme 2.1 wordpress platform without losing my links. I would prefer not to do 301 redicrects. With thesis I can specify the URL for each page of the wordpress site, however the wordpress site is hosted on hostgator as a subdomain of another site and the other problem is that wordpress adds a back slash that is not present on the old site. I can, however add .html to the URL's for pages on the wordpress site to conform to the URL's on the old html site. Will this work?
thx
Paul
p.s. the URL for my old site is www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com
-
What about links that aren't going to the home page but to other pages on my old site Can those also be redirected after the old site is taken down? The hostgator plan that I have puts the first site as the main domain and subsequent sites that I create and/ or host with them are subdomains. I read somewhere that for seo purposes it makes no difference.
Paul
-
I agree, the best way would be to use 301 redirects.
You will lose some benefit of links, but you will gain this with better internal linking that you can get if you setup Wordpress correct.
-
Hi,
As long as you have the domain then you have control over the redirects. The hosting is just a place that your domain lives in. So you can host your domain anywhere you wish and redirect the traffic within your new hosting account.
Also as I asked earlier what did you mean by 'the wordpress site is hosted on hostgator as a subdomain of another site'?
-
Also, forgive my ignorance but my old site is hosted on "homestead" and after I transfer my domain I will take down the old site. Don't the redirects have to be done on the pages of the old site, so when i take down the old site there won't be any more redirects? Otherwise put do I have to ekep the old site up and pay for hosting for it?
Paul
-
Are 301 redirects "permanent" meaning do they, over time, pass less and less link juice?
Paul
-
To remove the / at the end you'll want to go to settings and then to permalinks in wordpress and you need to change the url structure to look like the attached image. This is assuming that you are using post types as your urls.
I would still highly advise that you just use 301 redirects and remove the html because it sounds sounds a$$ backwards to add it back in intentionally, but that's more of a personal preference then anything that is actually seo beneficial.
As Dean asked, you should explain what you mean by it being hosted as a subdomain of another site. Either way it's setup you should be able to configure dns settings to set it as it's own domain even if it is technically sitting in a folder on another website.
P.S. Always remember to back everything up when making changes. In this case remember what setting the permalinks were on before or copy down what is currently in the custom structure area just in case for some reason it doesn't work out how you would like it to.
-
Just to add some info, I recently moved a site with lots of pages from blogger to Wordpress and just added 301 redirect from .htaccess and it didn't hurt the rankings.
-
To keep your links you need to:
-
Point the domain
-
In your hostgator Cpanel, go to "AddOn Domains" and create an entry for affordable-uncontested-divorce.com. In Document Root you need to add your Wordpress directory.
-
Go to Godaddy and point your domain to Hostgator Name Servers (it's in the left pane in your Cpanel under Name Servers)
-
Use Permalinks and keep the same URL structure when creating your Wordpress content.
-
In Wordpress go to Settings-> Permalinks and select the "Custom Structure". In the textfield insert /%postname%.html. This will solve the .html problem for posts but for pages you need to use rewrite rules. There is an old plugin that do it , but I don't know if it works with 3.9 http://www.introsites.co.uk/wordpress/html-on-pages-plugin.html.
-
Your "Home" page is http://www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com/Index.html. Create a page called "Index" and add your home content to that page. In "Reading Settings" define that page as your "static home page"
-
For the other pages, just create it with the same name that you're using now. Just under the title of the page in Wordpress Editor, change the permalink to the same URL of the old site.
If you need any help let me know...
-
-
Hi,
Just trying to understand 'the wordpress site is hosted on hostgator as a subdomain of another site'
So will your new site be
www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com
OR
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
-
Do I need to verify my site on webmaster both with and without the "www." at the start?
As per title, is it necessary to verify a site on webmaster twice, with and without the "www"? I only ask as I'm about to submit a disavow request, and have just read this: NB: Make sure you verify both the http:website.com and http://www.website.com versions of your site and submit the links disavow file for each. Google has said that they view these as completely different sites so it’s important not to forget this step. (here) Is there anything in this? It strikes me as more than a bit odd that you need to submit a site twice.
Technical SEO | | mgane0 -
Unnatural links to your site--impacts links
Hi, I just recive a "nice" Massage at my WMT- Unnatural links to your site—impacts links _Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more._Did someone here came across any massage like this before?if so, any suggestion on what to so next?Whould love for some help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tit0 -
Pages Linking to Sites that Return 404 Error
We have just a few 404 errors on our site. Is there any way to figure out which pages are linking to the pages that create 404 errors? I would rather fix the links than create new 301 redirects. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jsillay0 -
Moving site between hosts over short time scale
Hi Does anyone know if moving your website between hosts & server location 3 times in a relatively short time frame (say 2 months) can have a negative impact from an seo perspective ? Cheers
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Dan0 -
Merging multiple sites and contacting linking domains
This is strictly academic but I am having a friendly debate and I am hoping you guys could help me. If I decided that I wanted to merge several websites into a single new URL doing everything I am supposed to (page to page 301 redirects, etc), will I still need to reach out to those important websites that link to my different sites to have them change the links and anchor text to point to the new site? I know that 90% of the link juice is supposed to transfer and that you are SUPPOSED to contact linking domains, but is it really worth it, especially if there are literally hundreds of sites to contact?
Technical SEO | | Mike_Davis0 -
Does anyone use Ning (Custom social site)?
We just got a custom Ning site developed and the second we moved it to our domain, we lost almost all of our rankings in Google. So, we sign up for a SEOMoz Pro account and within a week we see that we have over 6,000 errors and warnings on our site. Duplicate content, duplicate page titles and pages with too many links. Is anyone using Ning and successfully maintaining 1st page rankings in Google? Seems to me that we need hundreds of fixes and modifications in the code of our site to fix all of these errors and get Google to take our penalizations off.
Technical SEO | | danlok0 -
Are article sites a good way to generate traffic and links
I read a lot that article sites are a great way to generate links and traffic but i would like to hear from people on here to see about their experience with article sites. I have tried article sites and i have to be honest that most of them are no follow links and have also not generate any traffic. I have written over 30 articles for free article sites with no traffic coming from them and this has been done over a eight month period can anyone recommend any good article sites that can produce traffic and also ones that produce do follow If you feel i am wasting my time putting articles on free sites then please do tell me
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How do you find bad links to your site?
My website has around 900 incoming links and I have a Google 50 penalty that is sitewide. I have been doing research and from what I can see is that the 50 penalty is usually associated with scetchy links. The penalty started last year. I had about 40 related domains to my main site and each had a simple one page site with a link to the main site. (I know I screwed up) I cleaned up all of those links by removing them. The single page site still exist, but they have no links and several of them still rank very well. I also had an outside SEO person that bought a few links. I came clean with Google and told them everything. I gave them all of my sites and that the SEO person had bought links. I gave them full disclosure and removed everything. I have one site that I can't get the link removed from. I have contacted them numerous times to remove the link and I get no response. I am curious if anyone has had a simular experience and how they corrected the situation. Another issue is that my site is "thin" because its an ecommerce affiliate site and full of affiliate links. I work in the costume market. I'm also afraid that I have other bad links pointing to my site. Dooes anyone know of a tool to identify bad links that Google may be penalizing me for at this time. Here is Google's latest denial of my reconsideration request. Dear site owner or webmaster of XXXXXXXXX.com. We received a request from a site owner to reconsider XXXXXXXX.com for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from XXXXXXXXXX.com may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality
Technical SEO | | tadden0