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
-
Use of multiple keywords that are similar for one local site
Hi I thought that if I wanted to rank a local site for the core Keyword, 'Landscaping Location' that variations of this keyword should be used on the same page. But I recently read that if I wanted to rank for: Landscaping Location
Technical SEO | | CamperConnect14
Landscaping in Location
Landscaping Services in Location that I should use separate page for each term. Is this correct? A small local website will probably only have a few pages and so making up pages solely to go after Keywords can't be right. But then would opportunities be missed? Thanks for your help with this!!0 -
Can you use Screaming Frog to find all instances of relative or absolute linking?
My client wants to pull every instance of an absolute URL on their site so that they can update them for an upcoming migration to HTTPS (the majority of the site uses relative linking). Is there a way to use the extraction tool in Screaming Frog to crawl one page at a time and extract every occurrence of _href="http://" _? I have gone back and forth between using an x-path extractor as well as a regex and have had no luck with either. Ex. X-path: //*[starts-with(@href, “http://”)][1] Ex. Regex: href=\”//
Technical SEO | | Merkle-Impaqt0 -
Mobile site content and main site content
Help, pls! I have one main site and a mobile version of that site (m.domain.com). The main site has more pages, more content, different named urls. The main site has consistently done well in Google. The mobile site has not: the mobile site is buried. I am working on adding more content to the mobile site, but am concerned about duplicate content. Could someone pls tell me the best way to deal with these two versions of our site? I can't use rel=canonical because the urls do not correspond to the same names on the main site, or can I? Does this mean I need to change the url names, offer different content (abridged), etc? I really am at a loss as to how to interpret Google's rules for this. Could someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? Any help or tips would GREATLY appreciated!!!!! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer0 -
I noticed all my SEOed sites are getting attacked constantly by viruses. I do wordpress sites. Does anyone have a good recommendation to protect my clients sites? thanks
We have tried all different kinds of security plugins but none seem to work long term.
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Should I ask third pages to erase their links pointing at my site?
Good Morning Seomoz Fans, let me explain what is going on: A surfing site has included a link to my Site in their Footer. apparently, this could be good for my site, but as It has nothing to do with my site, I ask myself if I should tell them to erase it. Site A (Surfing Site) is pointing at Site B (Marketing Site) on their Footer. So Site B is receiving backlinks from every single page on Site A. But Site B has nothing to do with Site A: Different Markets. Should I ask them to erase the link on their footer as Surfing people will not find my Marketing Site interesting? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Wordpress site, combine Blog without hurting SEO - Need Expert Advice
Hi, I come from the old html days of Frontpage and then moved to Dreamweaver. I first worked with Wordpress at version 2.7 and was not all that impressed, but then recently I worked in the new version and was extremely impressed. So my knowledge of Wordpress is VERY limited and plan to build future sites with it. I need to know the best way to solve an issue for a customer. The client is http://www.nextgenrestoration.com/ Site was built years ago with Frontpage. The popularity of Blogs was hot so someone told them that if they add new content it would be better to use a blog, so they added a blog. So you have the following: www.nextgenrestoration.com (main site) then they installed wordpress in a folder (blog) www.nextgenrestoration.com/blog Original person that built the site quit. New person took over and said the main site needed to changed to Wordpress because they did not have Frontpage and all they knew was Wordpress. Main site was converted to Wordpress. They wanted to keep the original design so they did not use a stock template, they just built it with their design. I guess from looking at the Editor, they manually went in and put the design in to match. Now.. this last month, the person that had changed
Technical SEO | | Force7
the site to Wordpress quit. So I got involved because the new person they hired could not add content to the main website. If you add a page, it does not show up, you have to manually go in the php and add the link to the category. The new person knows how to use Wordpress but she knows nothing about PHP so is lost when it comes to manually adding content to the site. Here was my Thoughts. The main site needs to be rebuilt in a stock template so it automatically creates new pages, blog posts. I have to make sure that if we change the
main website that we could keep all the same links and page names. The girl
that built the site, if you hover over the links that she put it under ‘florida’,
that must be a category. But we would need to keep the same page names. I know
we could do a 301 redirect but this guy cannot lose traffic. He is already down
in hits after the last Panda update. My thought was, rebuild the main site in a stock template so
someone can actually add content easily to the site. Also build a new blog
section so it all matches. (personally the existing design looks old and dated and needs updating) If you look at the site now. The blog looks totally
different and it is not helping if a customer comes to the blog but cannot see
the navigation for the whole site. My thought was to just leave the old blog, it has a LOT of backlinks. But just add a new blog to the main site and all new content goes there. The old blog would stay just make sure we did build in some call to action so it sends them to the main site. Also, we found we cannot create a Blog on the
wordpress we have installed in the main directory. I am guessing because it
wants to name it /blog? I want to be sure we give this client the best advice on what to do without
hurting his existing seo and traffic. As you can tell, I am not qualified to really give the best advice since I am so new to Wordpress. This is a small company that really needs some help. Thanks in advance for your time! Force70 -
We're working on a site that is a beer company. Because it is required to have an age verification page, how should we best redirect the bots (useragents) to the actual homepage (thus skipping ahead of the age verification without allowing all browsers)?
This question is about useragents and alcohol sites that have an age verification screen upon landing on the site.
Technical SEO | | OveritMedia0 -
What should I do about links coming in that are from link farm type sites?
I just noticed two back links to a couple of sites around pharmaceuticals/attorneys. The one link is to a chinese site with url: http://e.lifestyle.com.cn/fashionweekly/nzj/353093_2.shtml, and the other is to a site called Adroo: http://adroo.com/us/?view=list&list_id=104154&lang=en. Both appear to be some type of link farm sites, one has come in as a nofollow (surprise, you can buy "ads" on their site, both have decent DA. There is no reason for them to link to theses sites, should I find a way to stop the link? Also, on one of the sites we had a dmoz link and it is not showing in OSE? Link is still open in dmoz though. Thanks for any input.
Technical SEO | | RobertFisher0