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

[Lisa Rabey]

Jorge,

I am not expert, but as someone who has moved sites around and curious
about SEO process, I have done a lot of digging. As you have come
across, there seems to be discrepancies on what one should be doing vs
what one is doing.

Here is what I do. Hope this helps:

1. I installed following WordPress plugins: All In One SEO Pack,
Google XML Sitemaps, Broken Link Checker, and Redirection on all of my
sites.
2. Pages that need/were moved were moved and redirects were set up via
Redirection so those coming to the site via old bookmarks were going
to the correct page and not the old page. This also helped with
indexing with Google.
3. The two above also helped correct broken links internally as stuff
continued to get shifted and make sure everything is going to the
right place.

If you're planning on using content from the old static site in the
new site, your first option listed is going to be frowned upon. My
understanding is that it is similar to bombing a crawler because of
the indexing of duplicate content, even if it is just one or two
pages, so I would be leery on doing this.

I would also be leery of doing option 3 because this is not 1998
anymore -- plugins such as Redirection move people to the correct
paths while keeping your content intact.

I would suggest migrating your information from the static site over
to the new site, create Redirection links from old to new, and make
sure to use SEO guidelines and fill in All In One SEO Pack as much as
humanly possible. Broken Link Checker can let you fix links on the fly
that are broken and also you can do it in batches.

I also found verifying your domain at various social networks
(Pinterest, Google+, etc) will help in traffic and Page Ranking.

Best,
Lisa




Lisa M. Rabey | @pnkrcklibrarian
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Unreliable Narrator: http://exitpursuedbyabear.net
Cunning Tales from a Systems Librarian: http://lisa.rabey.net


On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 9:10 AM, Jorge Biquez <jbiquez at icsmx.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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> 2014-02-12

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2014-02-12