Custom Permalinks (aka alias') - does it look spammy to googlebot?

[nsjadmin]

I am moving my whole site over to wordpress (150+pgs). In the process I assigned pages to appropriate parent pages via "page attributes".

I was really excited about this. I like how it organizes everything in the pages dashboard. I also think that the sitemap that comes with my theme can create something really great for visitors with this info.

What I realized after doing that is that it changed my url to include the parent page. Basically, the url is now "domain.com/parent-page/child-page.html". This is rather disasterous because the url's of these newly created child pages on my old site are simple "domain.com/child-page". Not that they're defined as parent or child pages on my existing dreamweaver/html site... but you know what I mean - Right?!

I got a plugin called "Permalink Editor" to let me customize the url. So, I went through all of the child pages and got rid of the parent page in the url.

Then when I woke up this morning I realized that what I've created is a "permalink alias". That sounds a little bit scary to me. Perhaps like google could consider it spam and like I'm trying to "sculpt link flow".

I'm not... I'm just trying to recreate my site as it is in wordpress. I want the site to be exactly the same in terms of the url's. But, I want the many benefit's of wordpress' CMS.

Should I go an unassign all of the parent/child pages in the "Page Attributes". Or, am I being paranoid and should I leave it as is?

fyi - this is the first page that came up with I searched for permalink alias. It looks kind of black-hatty to me?!
- http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/wordpress-seo/seo-ultimate-4-7/

Thanks so much. I look forward to a response!

[nsjadmin]

Anyone??

[evolvingSEO]

Hi There

Here's what I would do;

1. Set up the new WordPress site exactly how you want it to appear. Use the best URL structure that makes sense - don't worry about what it was on the old site.  In most cases, the way WordPress does it with parent pages is totally fine.

2. In excel - make a column all the pages on your old web site - you can use Screaming Frog to crawl the site and do this. Then, in the next column, match the old pages with the corresponding new pages from the WordPress site. The URLs are going to be different but that's ok.

3. Last step - when you make the new WordPress site live, you just need to 301 redirect the old URLs from Dreamweaver to the new one for WordPress. A 301 redirect is something that directs users to the new updated page. You can do a 301 redirect with the Redirection plugin for wordpress.

What you end up with, is a new site with new URLs for each page - but the old pages get redirected to the correct new ones.

Hopefully that makes sense? And very sorry this question was not picked up sooner!

-Dan