Moving from www.domain.com/nameofblog to www.domain.com/blog

[cathibanks]

Describe your question in detail. The more information you give, the better! It helps give context for a great answer

I have had my blog located at www.legacytravel.com/ramblings for a while. I now believe that, from an SEO perspective, it would be preferable to move it to www.legacytravel.com/blog.

So, I want to be able to not lose any links (few though they may be) with the move. I believe I would need to do a 301 redirect in the htaccess file of www.legacytravel.com that will tell anyone who comes knocking on the door of www.legacytravel.com/ramblings/blah blah blah that now what they want is at www.legacytravel.com/blog/blah blah blah

1. Is that correct?

2. What would the entry look like in the htaccess?

Thank you in advance.

[Ray-pp]

Hi cathibanks,

I don't foresee you getting a significant SEO impact by switching from /ramblings to /blog. If users easily understand that /ramblings is your site's blog, then that is all you need.

Will you get a ranking boost because you now have 'blog' in your URL? No.

Continue to concentrate on creating value-added, unique content and your blog pages will naturally increase rank.

If you think it would help user experience by switching to /blog, then I do suggest making the switch. Since you're on WordPress, you don't need to access your .htaccess file, instead you can usually use your SEO plugin (Yoast) to create a custom redirect for any page.

[anthonydnelson]

You are spot on.

RewriteRule ^subdirectory/(.*)$ /anotherdirectory/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Taken from: http://coolestguidesontheplanet.com/redirecting-a-web-folder-directory-to-another-in-htaccess/

[EGOL]

You didn't ask about this but I think that it is worth considering... Let's say that you have a wordpress install on somedomain.com/blog/ and another one on somedomain.com/anythingelse/.

The install at somedomain.com/blog/ is going to attract a lot more weasels and is almost askin' people to throw wrenches at you.

Just my two cents.

[MoosaHemani]

I am not sure if there is any big of a SEO different in having your own blog name or the word blog itself. It is only important when you have lot of audience who is linking back to you and you have witnessed that as a standard they link your blog section by adding /blog to your domain name in any other case having a blog name or a word blog will make no big difference.

If you ideally want to redirect just go to your .htaccess file and include the following one line code.

Redirect 301 / ramblings /blog (code valid for your blog)

Once you will do that the browser will read the instructions and take you to the new URL instead of the previous one and your link juice will also transfer to the ne domain.

Hope this helps!

[cathibanks]

Well, it sounds like it may not be worth the brain damage to make the change.  Is that what I'm hearing?

If that's the case, I'm good with that!