Re-directing blogs from an expired Hubspot account

[Party_Experts]

We used hubspot for our blogging until 6 months ago, and had over 90 blogs on the hubspot subdomain "blog.site.co.uk".

We've since reverted back to our own "site.co.uk/blog" but have noticed we no longer gain the traffic from the 90+ blog posts we put through hubspot.

To get this content back onto our site thought i could simply relaunch it onto our own /blog site and use .htaccess to rewrite the old url to the new one.  But hubspot keep the landing page "blog.site.co.uk" from re-directing to the new blog post.

Questions:

1. Has the original hubspot blog post gone from google index?
2. Are there any other risks to re-posting this back to our site?
3. Any advice on closing off the old blog post?

Many thanks

Matthew

[garfield_disliker]

So if the placeholder domain you're using here -- "site.co.uk" -- is the same for both the Hubspot blog and your primary domain, this is more than likely what's going on. The only way Hubspot could serve pages on your domain and prevent you from redirecting them would be if you have CNAME records for your domain set up to point to Hubspot's servers. (Essentially this creates an alias.)

So if you want your redirects to work, you need to go into your domain name registrar and look at your CNAME records. If there's something in there for Hubspot, then remove it.

To answer your questions in order:

1. You can check the index by googling this format, not in quotes: "site:blog.site.co.uk"
2. If it's not indexed, no. Even if they are indexed, no. It just means you probably would not get much, if any traffic to them.
3. I would just make sure the old hubspot blog is down and then add them at your new location, as long as they actually got decent traffic. Then, provided you've taken care of the subdomain/CNAME stuff, write 301s from the old locations to the new ones.

[CleverPhD]

If Hubspot is preventing the redirects then that is your issue.  Google ranked (and sends traffic to) the Hubspot pages.  Unless you can setup the 301s from the old site to the new one, your new site will just look like duplicates of the old one.

Another option to see if you cannot get the 301s to work is to setup canonical links from the old content to the new.  Google most often treats this like a 301.    This could be a good interim step before getting 301s setup.   If Google updates with the new URLs in the SERPs and if you can get most of any external links pointing from the old blog to the new blog, you could then simply shut down the old block.  The canonical link would have updated the SERPs and the external links to the old blog have been updated to the new one.  Therefore, your old blog posts would not have any value to you (as they are not ranked in Google and have little or no links to them) and it would be ok to terminate.

Good luck!