Hey, I want to change my son's fan site completely. I want to change it to a Word Press platform. So, I need to completely start over basically. I don't want to lose the serps and backlinks he has. He will be using the same domain, but it will have all new content and pages. I need to 301 redirect the entire site to the home page. Right? If this is right, can you please tell me exactly what to do? Step by step please. I am really not good at this technical "stuff". Thanks!!!
You better redirect each old page to the corresponding new page: - old page 1 => 301 redirect => new page 1 - old page 2 => 301 redirect => new page 2 - old page 3 => 301 redirect => new page 3 - ... If your site is on an Apache server, it is easy to do that with a .htaccess file. You will find more information in my article about 301 redirects or google for 301 redirect .htaccess. Jean-Luc
yes, i will advise same as jean-luce redirect all pages using permanent 301 redirection, just take care that old domain should be there, once pr is passed you can remove old pages.
Thanks for responding. Not sure how to find out what kind of server my hosting company has. Can I 301 every page on the current site to the home page? You see, after I re-work this site, there will be no corresponding pages. Seojig---- Dude, there is no new domain.
The whole concept of redirecting is to redirect a url\page\domain to a new url\page\domain that has the same content.
So can I direct every page in the url that now exists to the homepage of the same domain? See what I am getting at? If not, what should I do? He wants his little site to be a word press one now. He has about 30 pages of content. He gets fairly good serps, and a good bit of direct traffic to each page. If I just delete the pages, he loses serps/ pr/ direct traffic to them. What should I do??
But do I have to redirect each old page to a seperate new one? Like make 30 new pages to redirect to? Or can I redirect all the old pages to the homepage?
One of the nice things about Wordpress is the ability to use page slugs. If you're not very technically inclined, you could manually go through and paste your old content into new WP posts and enter a page slug that matches your existing URL for that page.
Good point. But the old pages have the .html extension. You can't work this out with slugs. Can you??
Yeah, I think if you have extensions like that it'll rewrite them and strip stuff out, so that wouldn't work.
You can do it by going to your Dashboard, then Options > Permalinks and adding .html after the %postname% variable, if I recall correctly.
SearchBuddha's recommendation is good for what you are planning to do. Create post slugs, this would make, for example, the "url domain.com/Guide-to-fishing-in-panama/" you would then, if using Apache (you haven't stated what kind of server you are on?) 301 redirect "guide-to-fishing-in-panama.html to the new page, like this: redirect 301 /guide-to-fishing-in-panama.html http://www.domain.com/guide-to-fishing-in-panama/ Code (markup): Or, alternatively you could use Dan's method, I've never tried the method he states before, but I have used the 301 redirect and the new pages rankings picked up really well. For an added SERP boost, I advise installing the SEO All In One plugin for wordpress. These are the best and safest way to change the structure of a site. Good luck, you'll need it!