I'm going to convert a client's static site, all hand coded HTML pages to Wordpress. They have a bunch of static pages that I'm going to keep as 'pages' in Wordpress. There will be some static content that I'm going to convert into blog entries (and back date them).
How do I transfer their search engine rankings to the new Wordpress site? Some will be a static page converted to a Wordpress 'page' and some will be a static page converted to a blog entry?
Use 301 redirects in your .htaccess in root. All search bots recognize 301 redirects as permanent redirects and don't drop the pages from indexes, but reassign the URL. Put them above the Wordpress rewrite block in .htaccess.
The format is:
Redirect 301 /myoldurl.html http://mydomain.com/newpagename
Notice that the domain is not included in the first URL, only the page name with suffix, assuming it's in root.
Or use WordPress › Redirection « WordPress Plugins to manage redirects inside the WP admin area and log them, too.
You can usually create a permalink structure to match the client's old URL structure.
This is better than the htaccess approach since it is easier to maintain long term. The client won't have to adapt to a new URL structure, and you won't lose any SEO value as you would with 301s ( http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/03/google-confirms-301-redirects-result-in-pagerank-loss.html ).
For example if the old client URL was:
http://www.example.com/blue/widgets.html
you can use the permalink structure of:
/%category%/%postname%.html
You would then create a page (or post) with the post slug of 'widgets' and categorize the page within the 'blue' category which would give you the exact same URL as they had before.
If the old site uses a variety of inconsistent URL formats, this approach is slightly less effective. But you can still do this with the most used URL format, then 301 the other URL formats.
Hope this helps!
In your destination server, you can customize the .htaccess file to redirect old pages URL to new ones. The old URL will still work and the page rank will be kept.
I would consider using Jekyll to do this. It will enable you to create exactly the same site with the same HTML structure. It will give you full control, and therefore not damage SEO. You can add CloudCannon as a CMS and make your site responsive using media queries, like this: http://www.usecue.com/2016/04/21/two-viewports-to-rule-them-all.html. Baby steps will avoid SEO disasters.
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I would like to stop WordPress from redirecting the default URL pattern example.com/?page_id=id to the permalink. I would like it to result in a 404.
I don't want that users are able to find single pages by brute forcing my URL structure in a way that they are just trying out URLs with various page_ids.
My goal is to be able to use "hidden" pages with a random slug, so that only people who know the URL will be able to find the corresponding page. But if the pages are accessible via the page id that wouldn't make much sense.
I assume that there is a way to do that in WordPress itself. I don't want to use web server redirects like with the htaccess file, because I want it to be coupled more tightly with the wordpress application. In my experience htaccess files are sometimes messed up by inexperienced users. I want to prevent that the page_id redirections are accidently re-enabled if the htaccess gets messed up unnoticed.
We have an existing Drupal site. That is going to be replaced with a WordPress site on the existing URL. However, there has been a lot of SEO done on the drupal URLs so a google search will return those old URL's. We want to redirect to the new corresponding URL in the Wordpress site. However, since the drupal site is no longer live on the existing domain, the old URL's will just return 404 and cannot be redirected since they are not relative to the WordPress root. Is there a way to do this? Do I need to get those old drupal site URLs into WordPress somehow?
First of all you need to update your sitemap and add canonical's for permanent redirections. This wont directly redirect the page, but will let the search engines know that the url for the page has been changed and hence will avoid loosing your search engine rankings.
Then for actually redirecting the page you will need to update your htaccess
Redirect 301 /folder/oldpage http://www.example.org/newpage
If there are lots of pages you should consider using a wordpress plugin called redirection. This way you dont have to update the htaccess manually, and it will also keep logs of all the 404 pages that users have found, so you can also keep an eye on logs for any missing pages and redirect them accordingly.
I recently migrated a client's e-commerce site from Ecwid to WooCommerce. Ecwid's URL's use fragment identifiers which is now a problem as I can't set up a 301 redirect to the new URL using .htaccess. As I understand, everything past the # isn't accessible to .htaccess.
I'd like to try and preserve their SEO ranking as well as easily update all the old URLs to new.
There are dozens of Wordpress plugins which offer the ability to redirect pages, but I'm concerned I'll have the same issue. From what I've read Javascript redirects don't use the 301 response code, so search engines wouldn't know what the new URL is.
Is there any other way to redirect this:
example.com/products/#!/100-Cotton-Sash-Cord/p/19877065/category=4619310
to this?
example.com/shop/all-natural/100-cotton-sash-cord/
As you mentioned, everything after the # isn't processed by the server.
However, if your old site was previously indexed completely by Google, you can presumably pick the "ugly" URLs for the snapshot pages and redirect those?
A wordpress site I am working on was previously windows hosted and could not use htaccess to hide the index.php. All 200 or so news items are indexed by the search engines like
sitename.com/index.php/archives/5574
The site is now being moved to Linux, and the news items will now be like
sitename.com/big-story-of-the-week
If I change the permalink structure as proposed, is there any way I can get the site to still route the old index.php/archive links?
In your .htaccess file, you can add the following code using your sites URL structure:
Redirect 301 index.php/archives/5574 http://sitename.com/big-story-of-the-week
This would have to be done for each page.
More info here: http://wp-mix.com/redirect-urls-htaccess/
(Be sure to backup your .htaccess prior to making changes)
I am trying to merge my custom made directory site together with my wordpress site in one domain.
There seems to be issues with the url being redirected to my wordpress categories. How can i rewrite url in wordpress to compliment my directory site.
I don't think it's possible. Category, tag, page, post etc. slugs could collide with your directory names. You would have to either create a filter for WP to redirect specific URLs to your old content or modify your .htaccess file. Both methods are extremely complicated if you have a lot of pages, and overkill if you have only a few.
Why not migrate your old content to WP? Or if you don't want to do that, install WP into a subdirectory of your site, like /blog.