Moving off page blog to on page blog

[Rubix]

Hi,

I was using free wordpress blog and i have around 18-20 content on the blog. Now, we've managed to have blog on our main website which has www.mysite.com/blog extension. We did this so we could create more links on the website/

I am a little unsure how to move the blog now. Should we copy & paste the blog articles from old blog to new one  and remove them from old blog?  I am just not quite sure how would it effect the links.

If i keep the old articles on the old blog and create new articles for the new one, it'll take me a while before i get them written.

Any recommendation appreciated.

Thanks

[TomRayner]

Hey there

Let's run through the two options and look at the pros and cons of each:

Moving content from old blog to new blog - if you do this, the first thing you'll want to do is remove the old content from the old blog, as you mentioned.  This is to remove any chance of a duplicate content penalty.

Now, the links to your site from your old blog (plus any links to those blog posts) will be lost.  You will know better than anyone if those links are high value or if they are nice authoritative links.  You'd be losing those links in this method, but even if they were high quality I would be tempted to use this method anyway.

By having the blog content directly on your root domain, there's nothing stopping from high authority websites linking to those posts in the future, particularly if the content is timeless.  That means you'd be getting the benefit of those links directly to your site.

As a contingency, if you find any links pointing to your old blog and would like to keep them, reaching out to the webmaster who owns the site is a good idea.  I'm sure they'd be keen on not sending their own users to a 404 page as it makes them look bad.  Tell them you've updated the URL and you can keep the link.

As for the other option - keeping the old blog and starting fresh with the new one.  This will make your new blog appear sparse at first, which isn't that bad of a thing and certainly not from an SEO perspective.  You'd be keeping the links from the old blog to your site in this sense, but the only problem is that if people want to link to your old blog posts, you're not getting the direct benefit of that to your new domain.  The strength of that link will be diluted somewhat.

On a personal note, I always prefer keeping your content on your main site for contingency reasons anyway.  I want my site, or whichever site I'm working on, to be the number 1 stop for users looking for information, resources, tools, advice etc.  For that reason, I'd go with option one and take the necessary steps outlined above.

Hope this helps.

[Johnny4B]

If you are getting some link juice form the blog, I wouldn't take it down, not in the short term for sure

Can you not start the new blog from a blank canvas, I appreciate you have 18 entries in your current blog, but in the greater scheme its not that much.

You could of course create new similar articles within your new blog, and then eventually redirect your old blog to the new one, that way you retain most of your link juice.

Defiantly do not copy the text ,even if you are taking the pages of the first blog down, just because you remove something from a web server, it does not mean the page is still not indexed, it might be a while before the robots come looking again.

Really I would suggest create the new blog and start from their, as you add similar posts to the new blog as is on the old one, redirect the old post to the new blog.

If you feel you are getting no benefit from the old blog, of course you can reomve it, but I would'nt just copy and past the data to the new blog until you knew it was unindexed, you could use copyscape to verify within a few days because even requesting Google to unindex can take weeks to happen

Regards

John

[Rubix]

Hi Tom/John,

Thank you for your time and insightful points.

I've just check the back links that comes to old blog and i have quite few of them and it don't think it will be easy to update them and i do get link juice from the old blog. It may not be good idea to move from old one to new one then.

In this case, it 's better to create a new blog from scratch. One thing that I wasn't happy to do is to sent users to a blog where there are only a few articles. I've just thought that i can create a banner letting users know that the previous entries are available on old blog. I think this will prevent us look we are very new in the business

Thank you again!

[ThompsonPaul]

Just to make sure you know, Sida - it's possible to migrate a WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted one (like www.mysite.com/blog) and still keep most of the ranking/influence/linkjuice of the original blog flowing to the new site.

It's relatively straightforward to do. The benefit is, you get the best of both worlds - everyone going to the old site gets automatically redirected to the new site, so no concerns about duplicate content, and the ranking value gets passed to the new blog.

This means the new site will have all the old site's content, so it won't look "sparse" at the beginning. It also means all the traffic going to the old site will automatically land on the equivalent page of the new site, so the new blog will immediately have traffic. And as I said, almost all the ranking value of the old site will be moved to the new site as well.

The key requirement to accomplish this is, you MUST buy the Offsite Redirect service from WordPress.com which is what will redirect visitors and linkjuice to the new location. It's only $13/yr last time I checked. (1 yr is often enough)

There are many tutorials on the web for how to do this. Here's a good tutorial from wpbeginners.com and there's a version with a video on Mashable's site. (Iin your case a couple of adjustments will be necessary as you'll be transferring to your blog in a subfolder, not at the root of your site)

In my opinion, if you've got some good incoming links to your existing content on the WordPress.com site, it would be well worth the hour or two necessary to properly migrate it to your new main site blog.

Something to think about?

Paul