Hi

I don't think the percentage has changed at all. It can vary depending on specific circumstances, but as a default this should be largely consistent.

I don't have direct experience with tools to help migrate the content itself (most of my clients have developers do that). You might want to look at this: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-move/

It depends what the existing site is built with - if it's on a current CMS I'd google "migrate from [cms name] to wordpress".

Someone with good database skills could probably do it that way.

Hi There

It's definitely hard to say, without intimate knowledge of all aspects of the site - what the benefits will be by moving to WordPress. As a standard answer, I always see it as beneficial to move to WordPress. But the client should understand it's an investment, it's not like they're going to instantly rank better just by moving to WordPress. What it's going to do is put them in a better position (in a lot of ways) to rank better moving forward.

So in general, I'd always say "worth it" to make the move - but it's all in the specifics in the current site and how well things as executed.

It is entirely possible to have minimal link loss through redirects. You just have to;

1. Avoid chains
2. Make the redirects on a page by page level - and the topic needs to match (as Cyrus does a great job explaining here.)

You can fulfill both #1 and #2 no matter what platform you switch to, no matter how old the site is. You can always go back and undo redirect chains using the methods in the post I shared.

I'm not recommending a new design - I'm saying the process of how you go about implementing on the redirects can be a little more straightforward (and thus eliminating potential for chains and link losses). You first build the site in WordPress, without worrying about URL structure, .html slashes and so forth. Then you redirect old pages to the new pages however the URL structure ends up. You can go to past redirects and redirect them directly to the new wordpress URLs.

Hope that all makes sense - summary being - it is worthwhile to switch to WordPress - and any link juice loss is the fault of poor implementation, not the result of the switch itself per se

Hi There

What I would do is perhaps refine the process of how you're building the new site. In brief;

1. Build out the new wordpress site exactly how you want it. Don't sweat redirects etc.
2. When it's done being built, then match old pages to new pages to create redirects (do this by crawling the old site and the new site with screaming frog, you'll get your final list of old/new URLs, and just match them up).

This way, you're just focusing on making the new site as perfect as possible - and then do the redirects.

To answer specific questions;

Or is there a way to eliminate the added "/" WP attaches at the end?

There probably is, although I wouldn't sweat it too much. Whatever the new page is you end up, you're just going to redirect the old version to the new one.

And a way to custom add the real-estate-blog folder?

Yes - you can go to Setting->Permalinks and use "custom structure"

Hi

I would definitely do #2 and move to wordpress normally. The link juice loss is minimal. Just make sure you don't end up with chains of redirects, which you can follow my post here on finding and eliminating them;

http://www.evolvingseo.com/2013/10/09/how-to-find-fix-redirect-chains/

Hi Wesley

They won't see it as a normal link, but Google will try to probably crawl and process them, it just would take longer to do so. If you really want to prevent Google from crawling a link, use the rel=nofollow attribute like this on the link itself;

sign in

Reference here

I would generally stick with <a>links if you want to ensure web crawlers can crawl the links. Its possible they may be able to process <select>and crawl through to those pages, but I'd suspect it may be slower and less reliable than a normal anchor link.</select></a>

Hi Mike

That is odd for sure. I could see this being tricky to diagnose over a Q&A so I'll suggest some more things and ultimately you might want to try to see if someone can help.

These are just guesses / possibilities;

1. Do you have any caching plugins etc? Try disabling those
2. Try disabling / enabling Yoast. Your settings should remain.
3. Try one by one disabling other plugins and seeing if it changes.
4. Are you using a theme that could conflicting? Check your theme settings.
5. You may want to try Yoast support directly - he typically will claim it's not his plugin causing an issue (and 99% of the time it isn't) - so might be tough to get help, but that would be the ultimate source I think of a solution.

Beyond getting hands on with it, that's what I could offer as some other guesses. It does sound like something possibly simple. I would keep exploring all options! If you do find the cause feel free to write back and let us know.

Hi Mike

Yep it's clearer, thanks You had noindexed/nofollowed a lot of low quality pages, since improved them and want to return them to index/follow.

Just to check, do you have this option when editing each individual post in the Yoast box?

--> http://screencast.com/t/epjFCpGl8hT

Or do you mean you are selecting nofollow and it keeps switching back? Is Yoast and WordPress updated to the latest version?

Also, you are seeing "nofollow" in the HTML source? I know this is probably what you mean, just confirming to not miss a detail.

-Dan

Hey There

Just seeing if you still need help with this? Just to clarify, having a "nofollow" meta tag on the post does not prevent it from being indexed, that would be a "nopindex" tag - perhaps we're using the two terms interchangeably here?

To get the posts indexed again, you want three things to be true;

1. There is no "noindex" present in the html meta tags
2. There is nothing blocking the content in robots.txt
3. You are linking to the posts from the block so they are crawled.

If those three things are all true, Google does need to crawl the page again to then reindex it. Thomas is correct in that you can "fetch as Googlebot" in webmaster tools to speed up this process and you can then submit that page, or even the whole site to the index.

Let us know if you still need help!

-Dan

OK so what I would do there is;

1. Add meta noindex tags to the child pages.

2. Wait for them to drop out of the index (check for them every week or so with site: searches or cache:)

3. When they get noindexed, then add rel = nofollow to the links within the HTML that points to those child pages so they stop getting crawled in the future. You can leave the noindex in place if you want.

Hey There - glad you're enjoying the forums!

So if the tabbed "child" pages can not be crawled and indexed individually you have nothing to worry about. Are they indexed? Can you get cache for them by typing cache:www.yoursite.com/page-name ?

You can test crawling by using Screaming Frog. If the tabbed child pages do not show up when you crawl the site, you probably don't need to do anything.

If they ARE crawlable, then yes I would noindex them.

Hey There

I answered similar questions here;

http://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-redirect-login-401s

http://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-4xx-errors-from-comment-re-direct

But essentially Stuart has the right idea too. In the drop down it's linking to somewhere where users can go if they forgot their password.

If you don't want this crawled (which I recommend) by Moz, Google, Bing etc add this to your robots.txt file;

Disallow: /wp-login.php?action=lostpassword

So that goes under what's in there now.

Hi Joni

I was also going to recommend setting up events/goals as Chris mentioned. The goal gets tracked as a metric, so you can view metrics for any traffic source. You would basically do it in one of two ways;

• either have an event trigger when the "submit" button on the form is clicked

• or use the "thank you" or "confirmation" landing page URL and set the event as a URL destination.

Then, once you have an event, you can turn any event into a Goal.

While it is true you can get this data for Organic Search traffic in one bucket, unfortunately due to "not provided" you won't be able to get accurate data by keyword.

-Dan

Cool, you bet - thanks for following up and letting us know it worked out

I am not aware of a plugin that does this thing exactly. You may want to look into general shortcode plugins that have a whole variety of shortcodes and maybe within them you will find something that does what you are looking for - I wouls start with these;

http://codecanyon.net/item/intense-shortcodes-wordpress-plugin/5600492

http://wordpress.org/plugins/shortcodes-ultimate/

Hi Landon

I had a client with a similar situation. Here's what I feel is the best goal;

Calendar pages (weeks/months/days etc) - don't crawl, don't index

Specific event pages - crawl and index

Most likely the calendar URLs have not been indexed, but you can check with some site: searches. Assuming the have not been indexed, the best solution was to block crawling to certain URLs with robots.txt - calendars can go off into infinity, and you don't want to send the crawlers off into a black hole as it's not good for crawl budget, or for directing them to your actual content.