I have a domain that has content powered by a wordpress blog on the root. The existing pages have some decent search engine ranking. What I would like to do is move the wordpress blog into a new directory named /blog and add new static html pages under the domain's root directory. What do you guys recommend for placing the blog into a new sub directory while trying to salvage my existing search rankings. thanks in advance.
What you will want to do is setup a 301 redirect from each of the old URLs to the new URL. So if you had a page like abc.com/article1 you would setup a 301 redirect from abc.com/article1 to abc.com/blog/article1. Make sure the new pages are up and live before you setup the redirects and remove the old ones though. Wordpress has lots of plugins to help with setting up 301 redirects.
Yes! One more thing you can do is change each article url into new one by going to edit each article from there you can change the url.
If they are ranked well in Google, then I would NOT recommend you do this until and unless you really really have to. Because Wordpress has been known to get better crawl rates among Google. Moving onto static pages is going to make things go bad for you.
Your domain name is going to change. So you need to setup 301 redirect from old domain to new domain path. Your ranking will remain.
After changing the directory don't forget to redirect (301) all pages towards respective new one. 301 redirection is the best thing to remain in the rank in your situation. One more thing I would like to suggest that please don't change the existing URLs unless it is very necessary and you don't have other options.
well i would suggest you that rather placing each and every post into sub directory it is a smart option to place 301 to each and every page so that the post may be opened to the desired landing page.
If you dont want to loose search engine advantages then must use 301 rederection method for that. http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm hope this link will help you.
well, all the suggestions above should work. A 301 redirect will do you fine, but if I were you, I would keep everything intact in your blog and instead of moving it to a sub directory, I would just leave it as it is and create my static pages inside the WordPress Admin section, then put the page as the static homepage (from the options). This way, you'll maintain your structure and also have the static page(s) you need at the blog's home page. I hope this helps.