Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey There

What Barry says is true - you can throw anything in there and it will load, as long as the category is at the end.

But yes, for certain, in your case I would 301 redirect /shirts to /clothes/shirts (and all other categories). Crawl the site with Screaming Frog and keep an eye on 404 errors in Webmaster Tools for anything you might have missed.

I don't think there's any issue in regards to duplicate content.

-Dan

Hi There

Here's what I would do;

1. Set up the new WordPress site exactly how you want it to appear. Use the best URL structure that makes sense - don't worry about what it was on the old site.  In most cases, the way WordPress does it with parent pages is totally fine.

2. In excel - make a column all the pages on your old web site - you can use Screaming Frog to crawl the site and do this. Then, in the next column, match the old pages with the corresponding new pages from the WordPress site. The URLs are going to be different but that's ok.

3. Last step - when you make the new WordPress site live, you just need to 301 redirect the old URLs from Dreamweaver to the new one for WordPress. A 301 redirect is something that directs users to the new updated page. You can do a 301 redirect with the Redirection plugin for wordpress.

What you end up with, is a new site with new URLs for each page - but the old pages get redirected to the correct new ones.

Hopefully that makes sense? And very sorry this question was not picked up sooner!

-Dan

Hi Mike

In general, I will always "noindex subpages of archives" which is a setting you can check off with the Yoast SEO Plugin. Anything with a /page/2/ or /page/3/ etc is a "subpage" and checking off that setting in Yoast will noindex them, which is the best thing to do.

You can see the WordPress SEO post I did on Moz for more WP stuff.

-Dan

Hey There

Paul's right, it's going to be impossible to suggest exactly how to do this, since there's several nuanced steps that could be involved.

This is by far the best resource to follow if you're doing it by hand.

There are some plugins and third party sites like Manage WP  (which I used once with success) that can help too.

Once the WordPress site is up and live, you'll want to crawl it to look for broken links. The biggest thing is making sure all the old URLs redirect to the new ones.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hi Alan

I think a little more info would help.

Are listings going to be replaced and updated (and the page address stays the same) or are new listings going to be added (ie: new pages will be added)?

Basically, if the page URL stays the same, ie domain.com/neighborhood/listing/ and you're simply updating content - then Pages are the best way. And you would just use nesting etc to get the structure set up.

If the URLs change, and new ones keep getting added, then you may want to use Posts.

My guide to WordPress on Moz explains a lot of this stuff in detail.

And I did a little tutorial video on posts vs pages

This is a little unique case scenerio, so if you can give a little more info (or an example!) that would be helpful!

-Dan

Hey There

Assuming your WordPress theme isn't conflicting with any of this, so long as you select "noindex subpages of archives" in Yoast you should be good to go. No need playing around with anything else.

-Dan

Answered below as well, but wanted to drop this here in case anyone else is looking. WP has changed the location of what used to be "Privacy" under settings. The functionality (which blocks search engines from your wordpress installation) is now under Settings->Reading

[Screenshot](Hi Mark Did you find it? I struggled too for a bit, but it's moved to Settings->Reading See this screenshot -Dan)

-Dan

Hi Mark

Did you find it? I struggled too for a bit, but it's moved to Settings->Reading

See this screenshot

-Dan

As far as I know Google is more lenient with sitemap errors, but I would still recommend looking into it. The first step would be to be sure your sitemap is up to date to begin with - and has all the URLs you want (and not any you don't want). The main thing is none of them should 404 and then beyond that, yes, they should return 200's.

Unless you're dealing with a gigantic site which might be hard to maintain, in theory there shouldn't be errors in sitemaps if you have the correct URLs in there.

Even better, if you're running WordPress the Yoast SEO plugin will generate an XML sitemap for you and it update automatically.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Samuel

To avoid duplicate titles/descriptions for category pages you should noindex subpages - these are pages like /category/category-name/page/3/

-Dan

Hey Luke

Assume you mean XML Sitemap?

You should only include pages in your sitemap, which also are indexed. So then the question becomes, should you index tags or categories. I firmly believe, so long as the site is set up correctly, you should not index tags but it's OK to index categories. I also assume you're using WordPress.

So the steps become;

1. Noindex tag archives.

2. Then exclude tags from the XML sitemap.

You can refer to my WordPress SEO guide on Moz for more details.

Good luck!

-Dan