Hi there everyone, I'm trying to convert one of my HTML sites to wordpress, but I'm worried about what effects this might have on my Google rankings. My site currently gets about 100UV a day from google from various keywords. I'm mainly worried about URL structure. If on my old site I have the URL structure of www.domain.com\article-title ... and on my new site I have www.domain.com\articles\Article-Title Will that cause many problems? Should I just 301 redirect my old URL's to my new ones? Or is there some better way? Thanks, - P
it will affect the visitor to your site. For article your site got listed high rank in google will be over . you need to start from scrach. As it happened to me my got virus i had deleted every thing and upload again but my pr lost.
I think your SERPS will be gone, but you can use googles script that says: did you mean this url and then points out that url... I dorgot what it is called...But, if you have a wrong url or a url that is pointing nowhere, this script looks for similar urls and shows that to the user. I can only think that as the best way. But, can't remember what that script from google is called. May be somebody else can point it out.
It isn't a big deal as long as you 301 each and every URL to the new one. You might loose some rankings for a while but it should get back to normal after a couple of weeks. I think there is a wordpress plugin to remove the categories in the URL structure, that way your URLs would remain the same and the transition would be smoother.
I found this one: http://wordpresssupplies.com/wordpress-plugins/no-category-base/ I'm hoping it works, found a few reviews which says it works better than any other solution out there. So if my URLS are the same from the HTML site to the wordpress site, is there anything else I need to worry about?
Make sure the navigation is as similar as possible to the previous site. You have to be careful with duplicated content in wordpress, I highly recommend the "all in one SEO plugin" which takes care of the canonical problems. You might also want to read this article http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-things-relaunch-your-website If you want you can use our wordpress html sitemap generator
Use 301 correctly, you will lose nothing. Btw, wordpress is friendly too google, maybe you will get some points by the transfer.
Your website ranking might suffer for a week or two, just make sure to redirect all of your Old URL's to the New ones.. using 301 redirection via .htaccess