I have a website with many articles on HTML pages. The articles are doing extremely well on Google. I want to start managing the content with Wordpress but I am concerned about the consequences of converting the URLs from LLLLL.com/article-title.html to LLLLL.com/article-title/ If I do that I will have to do a 301 redirect for every article, but will that hurt my strong search engine performance? I don't want to mess it up. Thanks!
it doesn't really matter, because on wordpress Permalink structure you can still add .html at the end of it, so it remains same, and no need for 301 redirect. Like this -
On a similar theme I've recently replaced a static site built in dreamweaver with a wordpress site and put it in a folder: i.e. myurl.org/blog Some of the old pages are indexed in google and have PR and inbound links - I understand for these I can set up 301 redirects in the .htaccess file to redirect visitors and googlebots and pass on 'link juice' to the new pages. So I have two questions: 1. How about the homepage and root (myurl.org)? I can't redirect it to itself so will google react badly when it comes back to find a very highly ranked page has dramatically changed? 2. I know how to move wordpress out of the folder to the root, but what do I do with the old pages? Just delete everything else in the root directory? The site has a bit of flash before taking you to the index page, I want to kill this to but do I just delete it? I'm not even sure how that works? Any guidance much appreciated... J