Want to move site to wordpress and keep links without using redicrects

[diogenes]

I have an old cluny site that has been around for about 56 years. It is on the homestead platform. I want to  move the site to a thesis theme 2.1 wordpress platform without losing my links. I would prefer not to do 301 redicrects. With thesis I can specify the URL for each page of the wordpress site, however the wordpress site is hosted on hostgator as a subdomain of another site and the other problem is that wordpress adds a back slash that is not present on the old site. I can, however add .html to the URL's for pages on the wordpress site to conform to the URL's on the old html site. Will this work?

thx

Paul

p.s. the URL for my old site is www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com

[DeanAndrews]

Hi,

Just trying to understand 'the wordpress site is hosted on hostgator as a subdomain of another site'

So will your new site be

www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com

OR

www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.ANOTHER-DOMAIN.com

[RicardoLG]

To keep your links you need to:

1. Point the domain

2. In your hostgator Cpanel, go to "AddOn Domains" and create an entry for affordable-uncontested-divorce.com. In Document Root you need to add your Wordpress directory.

3. Go to Godaddy and point your domain to Hostgator Name Servers (it's in the left pane in your Cpanel under Name Servers)

4. Use Permalinks and keep the same URL structure when creating your Wordpress content.

5. In Wordpress go to Settings-> Permalinks and select the "Custom Structure". In the textfield insert /%postname%.html. This will solve the .html problem for posts but for pages you need to use rewrite rules. There is an old plugin that do it , but I don't know if it works with 3.9 http://www.introsites.co.uk/wordpress/html-on-pages-plugin.html.

6. Your "Home" page is http://www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com/Index.html. Create a page called "Index" and add your home content to that page. In "Reading Settings" define that page as your "static home page"

7. For the other pages, just create it with the same name that you're using now. Just under the title of the page in Wordpress Editor, change the permalink to the same URL of the old site.

If you need any help let me know...

[RicardoLG]

Just to add some info, I recently moved a site with lots of pages from blogger to Wordpress and just added 301 redirect from .htaccess and it didn't hurt the rankings.

[spencerhjustice]

To remove the / at the end you'll want to go to settings and then to permalinks in wordpress and you need to change the url structure to look like the attached image. This is assuming that you are using post types as your urls.

I would still highly advise that you just use 301 redirects and remove the html because it sounds sounds a$$ backwards to add it back in intentionally, but that's more of a personal preference then anything that is actually seo beneficial.

As Dean asked, you should explain what you mean by it being hosted as a subdomain of another site. Either way it's setup you should be able to configure dns settings to set it as it's own domain even if it is technically sitting in a folder on another website.

P.S. Always remember to back everything up when making changes. In this case remember what setting the permalinks were on before or copy down what is currently in the custom structure area just in case for some reason it doesn't work out how you would like it to.

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[diogenes]

Are 301 redirects "permanent" meaning do they, over time, pass less and less link juice?

Paul

[diogenes]

Also, forgive my ignorance but my old site is hosted on "homestead" and after I transfer my domain I will take down the old site. Don't the redirects have to be done on the pages of the old site, so when i take down the old site there won't be any more redirects? Otherwise put do I have to ekep the old site up and pay for hosting for it?

Paul

[DeanAndrews]

Hi,

As long as you have the domain then you have control over the redirects. The hosting is just a place that your domain lives in. So you can host your domain anywhere you wish and redirect the traffic within your new hosting account.

Also as I asked earlier what did you mean by 'the wordpress site is hosted on hostgator as a subdomain of another site'?

[PIXUS]

I agree, the best way would be to use 301 redirects.

You will lose some benefit of links, but you will gain this with better internal linking that you can get if you setup Wordpress correct.

[diogenes]

What about links that aren't going to the home page but to other pages on my old site  Can those also be redirected after the old site is taken down? The hostgator plan that I have puts the first site as the main domain and subsequent sites that I create and/ or host with them are subdomains. I read somewhere that for seo purposes it makes no difference.

Paul