Redirecting old pages to homepage/index - wordpress

I have taken over an old domain and put a new site on it, it use to be a membership site so I have thousands of old URLs that now go to a 404 page.
Should I redirect these to the homepage to keep the link juice, it is a relative subject, so the links are useful.
If so how would I do it? This is a wordpress site.
/user/*
/image//
What is the best way to deal with these 404's?

I would redirect them to your homepage. Google (and all other crawlers) will notice the change, so you can provide a better and continuous user experience for your users.

There is a brilliant plugin called Redirection (https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/) that will allow you to configure redirects in WP, including logs of 404's that visitors to your site experience to help you know where redirects might be necessary.
A word of caution: there are some major implications to putting redirects in place including effects on your site's SEO. I recommend you read up on the different kinds of redirects and what they do.
Reading on the topic: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Redirections

Related

Does Wordpress list all pages for crawlers?

I created a page on a Wordpress site that was for internal use only and triggers some backend code. Within a few days I started seeing hits on that page from "bingbot".
I'm not using any kind of sitemap plugin. How are crawlers finding this page?
I know the robots.txt file can block them but I want to make sure they don't show up for crawlers that don't respect this. I still want to have the page publicly accessible if someone types in the URL.
What needs to be done in Wordpress to make sure a page can't be discovered except by typing in the URL?
Any given URL is potentially "discovered" once the post is published and if there's a link to it from elsewhere on your site. There's no guaranteed way to prevent search engines from indexing a URL.

How to list all pages in Google search results?

My website was recently hacked and Google mentioned "This site may be hacked" so I removed the entire wordpress website and changed server. I installed a new wordpress website however, Google is still crawling the old pages. It runs into 20+ Google pages meaning there's over 200 links generated by the hack.
Now, I would like to do a 301 Redirect to all this links using htaccess so Google cache faster and remove these links.
How do I list all this links displayed in the searched result? or is there a better way to do? Yes, I have asked Google for Review but they said it will take several weeks :(
You can see all youre indexed pages by writing this in Google search
site:example.com
Just write youre domain name instead of example.com

From wordpress to SPA application - SEO issues

I need to test in terms of SEO a new page which was exported from wordpress to single page application. I want to keep my rank in search results. Unfortunately I am not sure how to do it properly.
Could you please give me any advice?
I know that I need to verify sitemap and broken links. Could you please recommend any tools to do it automatically?
The most important thing to do is to use the same URLs you have from your old website, or use 301 redirect method to redirect the old URLs to the new one.
Regarding the one pages, its not good for SEO since all your content will be in the same page, and here you can't target many keywords.
Still you can use one page website with advanced techniques to rank one many keywords but here it will affect the UX.
Regarding the XML site, since you have one page in your new website, you have to redirect all the pages to the new one using 301 redirect or you will have many 404s in the webmaster tool.

WordPress SEO by Yoast Changing sitemap xml url

I want to change the url for the sitemap xml in seo yoast plugin.
from: http://example.com/sitemap_index.xml
to: http://example.com/sitemap-something-unique-aqw65643.xml
I know exactly how to change it using rewite rule, but my problem is that I don't know if this is safe.
Is there anyone can explain me what will be the bad effect?
Using a URL rewrite rule for something like this should not impose any negative side-effects. You are simply directing traffic from one URL to another. There are even some benefits of using rewrites when it comes to SEO but those mostly pertain to your page URLs. Since you are using WordPress, I'm sure that's not the advice you're looking for.
There is thread on Google Support here that talks about URL mapping when preparing to migrate to a new domain. I'm sure some of this might be helpful information for your situation. I would lean toward a 301 Permanent redirect for a sitemap that I was submitting to Google or another search engine.

URL hijacked, sort of - how, why and should I be worried?

I'm seeing a weird url in my google analytics. It's http://www.lisaredstone.commessage57741318.cenokos.ru/ and it redirects to an ecommece site. My clients site is http://www.lisaredstone.com. What's the story with this - is it something I need to be worried about? How do the .ru's leverage it to their benefit? What actions should I take?
It could just be someone is duplicating your GA account number and using a rewrite redirect. the .ru is a russian extension. I did find this page http://www.cradlecloud.com/how-to-ban-and-block-cenoval-ru-referrer-spam/ that may help you. but if it isn't actively redirecting any of the links on the site (which I tried several) I don't think there is anything to worry about, but someone who knows more about site security may be able to tell you more.

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