We are switching our CMS local pages from a subdomain approach to a subfolder approach. What's the best way to handle this? Should we redirect every local subdomain page to its new subfolder page?

[SEO.CIC]

We are looking to create a new subfolder approach within our website versus our current subdomain approach. How should we go about handling this politely as to not lose everything we've worked on up to this point using the subdomain approach?

Do we need to redirect every subdomain URL to the new subfolder page?

Our current local pages subdomain set up: stores.websitename.com

How we plan on adding our new local subfolder set-up: websitename.com/stores/state/city/storelocation

Any and all help is appreciated.

[Ray-pp]

Hi SEO.CIC

Yes, you'll need to 301 all the pages from the subdomain to the new page, in order to keep the authority from the old pages.

That's really the short answer to the question. Now, it is about finding out how to 301 all the pages easily and that depends on your environment's server setup / CMS.

As long as you have a consistent schema in place, setting up the 301 from sub domains to sub folders shouldn't be terribly difficult or time consuming.

[SEO.CIC]

Great! Thank you for your insight Ray-pp.

If our subdomain pages are hosted by a third party, are they able to transfer these pages easily to us?

Thank you in advance.

[Ray-pp]

that would depend on your 3rd party agreement and the CMS being used. If it's a CMS like WordPress, then it could be as simple as an export and import from one WordPress installation to the other.

Most hosting companies will help their customers migrate their sites from one place to another, or charge a small fee for the process.