Going To Wordpress. What to do with the old version?

[Wesley Johnson]

One thing you'll want to do is always link related older blog entries in new posts. For instance, if you're writing up a yearly program, include the phrase "In last year's Program X..." and link it to the entry for the previous year's. Google sees this as a general link and not you linking back to your own site; this improves your importance ranking to the search engine. The value of doing this increases as your site's popularity increases. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Web technologies in libraries [mailto:WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Jorge Biquez
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 8:11 AM
To: WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Going To Wordpress. What to do with the old version?
Importance: High

Hello all.

I hope the following questions do not sound so stupid. I do not know what could be the best answer.

Finally we move to Wordpress. It is working fine we have some ideas to implement in the future and we are studying for doing our own plugins, following the advice on previous conversation here .

We would like to be indexed and listed on search engines of course with this new version. Our old version of website was good indexed and we received good traffic in it.

Asking a couple of expert companies in SEO they  gave us different advice but we are not sure what would be the best.

1) Leave old pages as they were and include a legend in each page telling there is a new version and redirect to new main page after 20 seconds. That way, they say, indexers, bot robots and search engines will still find us.

2) Start from a fresh and clean structure. Deleting all the old web pages (they were static ones) . That way the index will be done only in new pages only. It will create lot of "not found" errors but that will be the best even when traffic will be almost zero at the beginning.

3) Leave old pages without redirection and only with a legend that there is a new version and that users should go to new page.

I am specially curious since it is a good exercise to learn more about how search engines will do with our new web pages. Yes, I know there are tons of new web pages added daily and that now it is more difficult to gain position on search engines that's why I decided to ask for you advice.

If You have done something simila. To move from static simple html web pages to a dynamic system like Wordpress or similar. What did you do with the old version?

Any other SEO tips to consider (free or not so expensive) to gain position in search engines with the new website. Of course assuming you have tags and all recommend stuff in the new site?

Thanks in advance for the time and comments.

Jorge Biquez

============================

To unsubscribe: http://bit.ly/web4lib

Web4Lib Web Site: http://web4lib.org/

2014-02-12

============================

To unsubscribe: http://bit.ly/web4lib

Web4Lib Web Site: http://web4lib.org/

2014-02-12