Subdomain to Subcategory migration for an active news website blog

[RishadShaikh59]

A very active news website has a very active blog as a sub-domain. For all good SEO reasons, they want to transfer the blog from a subdomain to a subcategory. Now, the issue is this blog is very active, updated daily and lots of people comment on it. So how should the website go about making this change while causing minimal seo loss and ensuring that the commenting process remains active and on going. A detailed answer would be much appreciated! Thanks!

I cam accross this blog post that guides on how to change a subcategory to a subdomain: http://devilsworkshop.org/moving-a-wordpress-blog-from-a-subdirectory-to-subdomain-preserving-permalinks/.

Any words on this would also be appreciated!

[ThomasHgenhaven]

The simple way to do it is to 301 redirect it from blog.activenewswebsite.com to activenewswebsite.com/blog. Whenyou use a 301 redirect, the users will not notice anything and their commenting behavior shouldn't be affected by it.

[RishadShaikh59]

Yes, I understand that we have to use 301s for the urls. That part is clear for us. However, how do you go about making the actual change? See, we add like 5 to 8 blogs daily and comments continue...so, how do we go about this? Do we publish the same content over onto the new category and then 301 the links? It is not possible for us to publish the entire content again. Also, if this is not the case, then what about current blogs? Like we have 5 new blogs today and we decide to activate the sub category, what should we do? I hope you get what I mean!

[randfish]

Hi Rishad - depending on the way the blog format is built and the backend technology, this might be either a bit challenging or quite simple.

If, for example, you're using Wordpress, you can simply use the same exact format, but republish the existing content at the new URLs (essentially changing where the installed version of the blog publishing software points). If, however, you've got something custom, you'll need the developers/engineers to make changes in the codebase to publish at the new URLs.

For everything old, you'll want to create what's called a "rewrite rule" - either ISAPI rewrite (if using Microsoft/ASP/.NET/IIS base) or mod_rewrite (if using Apache/LAMP). Your developers should be familiar with how to do these, but if not, there's some good, more details resources here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

The fact that it's on a subdomain won't make a huge difference - it should just make the rewriting and the pain from potential lost Google juice less harsh.

One thing I'd also suggest - sending in new XML Sitemaps via Google + Bing Webmaster Tools when you relaunch. You want them seeing those new URLs quickly (link building to the new blog location and tweeting/FB sharing those URLs can help, too).

Best of luck!
Rand