301 juice from my old website to the new one?

[roybatti]

Hi there!

I am the proud webmaster of two websites, my old one: bioenergeticaconvicen.wordpress.com, currently with decent  rankings in Google Spain (as bioenergeticaconvicen.com without the www, if i am not mistaken) on keywords like "Bioenergetica", "bioenergetica barcelona" "formacion en bioenergetica" "bioenergetica transpersonal" -You got the idea. and my new one, "www.biomayeutika.org" , wordpress as well, with somehow decent rankings on "centro de bioenergetica" "bioenergetica" etc. It's a health an spiritual business: we dance, breath and mainly just feel our bodies without trying to control anything that happens. Cool

It's a very local business, aiming mostly for people from Barcelona/Catalonia but also for people from the rest of Spain.

a) I guess my main question is just how to pass the old "SEO juice" to the new website. Currently, there's just a link on the old one pointing to the new one.

b) Will I somehow merge the rankings of the two?

c) How do i do a 301? which pages? With a wordpress plugin?

Thanks very much in advance for your help.

P.D.: Secondarily, I am open to suggestions on how to improve my SEO strategy (currently, none :)) I am very active in Facebook and have a few good videos and pictures, but I haven't really tried to do good SEO.

[Chris.Menke]

Roybatti,

What is your goal with  the two sites?  Do you want to keep them separate or is your plan to eliminate to old one--and why?

[roybatti]

Hey!

My old website was a personal project of Bioenergetics with a design I didnt like and not-so-good information structure, but it ranks pretty well nevertheless because there is a lot of text and people would come there through my facebook marketing. I no longer maintain it, because now my personal project has developed into Biomayeutika, which I run with 2 more people. It's no longer "bioenergetics with Vicen", but biomayeutika or bio+ as we affectionate call it.

There's a lot of text that ranks pretty well in the old site bioenergeticaconvicen.com

As I see it now, I have several choices, but I don't know which one to choose.

a) keep the old site as it is and 301' bioenergeticaconvicen.com ---> www.biomayeutika.org Can I do that? With wordpress plugins maybe?

b) keep it as it is. Visitors to the old site get this message saying this domain is no longer maintained and my new website is www.biomayeutika.org, but I fear I might lose some people and anyway I thought you could somehow "merge" the rankings of the two

c) Delete the content and domain of the oldsite and somehow move it to my new one.

d) Other options?

The thing is, I haven't 301' before and I am a little confused. My idea is to try to rank higher for my main website, biomayeutika.org, but I don't know if google just "deletes" the contents of the old one and how the rankigs for some words would be affected....

I hope I made myself clearer this time. The problem is surely my lack of knowledge in this field. Thanks!

[xvpn902]

Hi Roybatti,

You can't really pass the juice over, but if this is just an old website and domain that you want to change over to the new one, redirecting each page to the new url would be one step. Then the new site would get the hits and eventually get it's own rankings. You can't transfer or merge the rankings, but you can concentrate on the new site to make it visible.

You can try http://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-301-redirects/.

[roybatti]

Hi,

but do I have to keep paying for the domain? Do I delete the contents? It's really difficult, because some rankings are from the blog. I don't know, Im still confused.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

It sounds like you need to setup 301 redirects for the old site to the new site.  If the content of the old site is still good, I'd recommend adding it to the new site.  Setup canonical tags on the old and new sites indicating that the canonical URL is the one on the new site.  After a couple of days/weeks you should start seeing the rankings from the old site shift to the new one.  Then 301 redirect the old site's page to the same page on the new site.  Any pages on the old site that do not have a directly correlating page on the new site can be 301 redirected to the page on the new site that is most closely related to it or just redirect to the homepage of the new site.

You will need to keep the old site up for at least 6 months to give time for the search engines to log all the redirects.  After that, you can delete it if you really want to or just keep it up.  It's redirecting all traffic, so it's not like you have to worry about maintaining the site.

You're probably not going to see a perfect shift of rankings from the old site to the new, but you will see some and most of the page authority of the old site should be transferred to the new site.  It should also be noted that if both sites currently rank well for certain keywords, redirecting the old site to the new site will most likely not result in the new site having two rankings for the keyword, but rather one of the rankings will drop.  Unless it's a very noncompetitive keyword, Google tries to only list a site once in the top 10.

I hope that helps.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[roybatti]

Thanks very much Kurt!

One last thing. What is the best way to do this canonical stuff with wordpress sites?

If I understood it correctly, I have to

a) set up canonical tags on both the new and the old site pointing to the new page

b) copy content from old site to old site

c) set 301,'s from old site to new site from each and every URL to the new one.

Any good doc to help me?

You have a Good answer anyway!

Thanks!

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Good questions. You understand correctly. Unfortunately, I don't have a Wordpress recommendation. I've always used a .htaccess file for redirects, not worked directly in Wordpress.  So, I don't have a recommendation.  I'm sure someone in Moz does, though.

[roybatti]

Oh old blog is bioenergeticaconvicen.com which is in a wordpress.com bioenergeticaconvicen.wordpress.com .. it's migrated to www.biomayeutika.org .

Unfortunately old site is wordpress.com ... any suggestions? Thanks!!

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Sorry.  I'm not familiar enough with Wordpress.com's options.