I have just bought Thesis for Wordpress, and I'm about to "relaunch" my blog. At the moment, I'm using Drupal, but I want to start using Wordpress again (it's a long story why I had to switch from wordpress to drupal). My question is this: I'm receiving some traffic (a few hundred visitors) from Google and other search engines every day. Now, because I'm switching to wordpress I have to change the urls to the blog posts (at least to some blog posts). My blog is a few years old, and I have "many" blog posts. So far, I have two types of urls: http://slymarketing.com/archives/why-your-backlinks-should-be-relevant and http://slymarketing.com/2009/01/how-to-create-friends-lists-on-facebook Since, most of the traffic from search engines comes to my old blog posts (where the url is based on /date/ not /archives/), I'm thinking that I should stick with this type of urls and then use a redirect for the blog posts that doesn't have this url today. But, on the other hand, I'm also thinking that I should not use date or archives in the url, only domain.com/blog-title/ Whatever I do, I think I'll have to redirect all my other blog posts manually (if not I'll probably lose traffic). I'm looking for some advice, since I'm really unsure what to do. I don't want to lose traffic, and at the same time I'm thinking long term. I want the urls that will be the best for my blog (but I'm not sure if it really matters if I use the date, archives, or nothing, as long as I have the blog title in the url). Thanks. Jens
If you want to cange use webmastertools and do redirects to the new location 301 or 302 I always mix them up . Why not do a rewrie in .htaccess so that you do not need to do them all manually? Also Idk if you would be interested but my site has an API that could make your pages shorter . Back o topic though as long as you do not change your homepage or loose pages you should not loose members . Good luck with your change.
It's not a bad idea if you can able to got all pages being redirected page by page. However, thinking about the logic and it is not reasonable for me. You would waste a huge period of time just to get those urls structure changed a little. Why don't you put a time on link building / add new contents / fine tune on internal linking strategy instead? I didn't say the change on url won't have any positive effect on SEO but that is not a big factor that worth enough for your time. However, it's up to you anyway.
Google guys have said that sticking to the same URLs is best if possible. 2nd best is using 301 redirects to redirect to the new page. You should definitely at least do this. There are WordPress plugins that will manage this for you, I believe.
Thanks a lot. So far, I think I'll install a wordpress plugin for the 301 redirects, then I'll change the permanlinks to /postname/ instead of /archives/postname/ and /date/postname/
Wordpress has a feature built in so you can copy the /date/article name type of URL - so some of your urls will not change. I think its under setting, reading. Anyway, even if your urls did change, if your site is a couple of years old and have lots of backlinks, google will register the change pretty quick. About a year ago I changed the URL settings on my blog, and my ranking never dropped. Google picked up the change and never missed a lick.