Moving wordpress to main website - errors galore

[AlanBleiweiss]

I agree with Ryan on many aspects of SEO.  In this situation, we diverge to a certain extent.

For me, it's the concept of 301 Redirecting any content you have on a site at all.  If you have the content, it should be indexed.  It's really that simple.  Because by redirecting it, you're telling the search engines it doesn't exist.  Which is not true.

So you're doing the redirect not because a page has actually moved, but for pure SEO reasons.  And that is, in my opinion, a direct conflict of SEO best practices tenets that you consider your users first and foremost, NOT the search engines.

In this view, if you're doing a 301, it's because there's something else improperly occurring regarding your SEO methods.  You're treating the symptoms, not the cause.

Treating symptoms and not the cause may work today, however over the evolution of SEO, it has always proven to be a myopic view and ends up not providing the long term value that only treating the cause can do.

So either actually delete the content you don't want, or move it - you can even make it a permanent page within the area of the main site - as a sub-link from the highest level page you want ranked.  Then you can do a 301 redirect, which is valid use of the redirect function.

Or leave it as is, and focus on building stronger content and signals to the pages you prefer to be ranked.

The only pages that exist on a site that should not be indexed are pages that include member area sign-in pages, secure shopping process pages, and similar pages.  And those shouldn't be 301 redirected - they should get the noindex, follow treatment if you want their on-page links to main site pages adding to the site-wide overall strength, or they should be noindexed in the robots.txt file altogether.

[GardenBeet]

Ryan - yep sorry did not mean to sound critical - apologies -

I found your sugesstions very helpful -

[GardenBeet]

ok thanks ...will think about this

[RyanKent]

I agree with Alan 100% on the re-direct.

My initial reply was lengthy and perhaps my point wasn't clear. I am still struggling on balancing my desire to offer good advice versus directly responding to the original poster's question.

My advice to Felicity is to keep both the blog page and the website page discussing Garden Art IF the pages are not duplicates and each offers unique content. In that case, each page should be optimized for different key words and the current 301 from the old blog site should be maintained.

My direct response to Felicity's question about her action of how the blog page was effectively removed by 301'ing the URL to her website page is...if you are going to take that approach, then re-direct the old blog page directly to the website page. Don't use a 301 from old blog page to new blog page, then another from the new blog page to the web page.

If I could jump into a time machine, I would re-organize the way I responded to this Q&A to focus simply on the best methods which should be used, and not talk the methods which were used. Live and learn.

[GardenBeet]

Ryan thanks for your help !!!!!

[AlanBleiweiss]

Ryan,

This is what happens here as you well know.  We're not being paid for hours of review, evaluation and consideration.  So sometimes we don't get that "let me sit on this for a couple days" opportunity to formulate a well crafted, re-arranged response...

[GardenBeet]

thanks to you too Alan

[LaraMcCulloch]

Alan & Ryan, I'm the Lara referred to in this thread. I'm wondering if either of you can recommend someone who can help me with the transition I need to make - i.e. move ready2spark.com and all applicable posts (currently my blog) to ready2spark.com/blog. My web designer is not comfortable with it and I'd like to ensure it's done correctly. Would you also mind letting me know a range of what something like this would cost?

Thank you in advance.

Lara

[RyanKent]

Unfortunately I don't have any good recommendations for you. I am working on building my first WP site so I can better understand how that popular software works.

I would recommend prior to merging the sites to look at your content from a SEO standpoint to avoid the issues Felicity encountered. Ensure your blog pages will not compete with your website pages for the same keywords.

The person who merges your site most likely will focus on the merger from the technical aspect of ensuring the content is physically located on the same server and redirects are in place. They would not be expected to consider SEO issues unless you specifically requested it.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Lara

two people I trust when it comes to WordPress issues are Andrew NorCross and Joe Hall.

Between them they get all my WordPress work (for my own sites and clients).  Cost is something you'll need to discuss with them.

[LaraMcCulloch]

Thank you, Alan. I will contact both.

[dignan99]

Lara,

Contact the person/company who HOSTS the website.  They should have the knowledge to do this properly with very few negative repurcussions.  That is how I typically move mine if I am working on a dev wordpress site.

Your hosting company should also have a decent backup system, and if the backend is run on Cpanel that would be awesome.

[LaraMcCulloch]

Thanks, dignan99. I'm currently hosting with Bluehost and their customer service is AMAZING. However, they haven't been able to help me with this issue since, as they say, wordpress is unique. That said, I didn't have all of this great information back then so I'll revisit it with them at your suggestion and see if they can help.

Thanks again for the suggestion.