SEO First – How To Move your WordPress Blog

SEO First

I first thought; I want a website. So I went out to buy jimgaudet.com. When that was not available (damn musician! ) I picked up this domain; thejimgaudet.com. Not bad, I like it and I am on the first page if you search Google for “Jim Gaudet”, so I am satisfied. Anyone looking for me will know I am not a musician. After designing the website I thought; I should have a blog. So like many people I just added the blog to the end of my domain like this;

thejimgaudet.com/blog

This was fine for a while until I noticed I really didn’t need a website, a blog would do just fine. The blog was taking up enough of my time. So I redirected my main site to my blog and left it at that. I did 301 redirects so I would not have problems with the search engines Google. Then I noticed a problem in Google Webmaster Tools. I couldn’t check some of the stats because it was not the  root domain. So now I needed to move my WordPress blog from http://thejimgaudet.com to http://thejimgaudet.com/

Easy Steps to Move your WordPress Blog

To actually move the blog is easy, the part to worry about is the backlinks you have to your blog. Links from posts submitted to Digg, Reddit, Mixx and other sites. All my links are pointed to /blog and I need to make sure they redirect to the proper post after the move. Here you will see how I will redirected (301) my backlinks to their new locations.

If you want to learn how to backup your WordPress blog get it here

1) You should put your site into maintenance mode. If you do not have the plugin go here 2) Now  go to Settings – General and change these 2 settings;

• WordPress Address – This should be your domain name, make sure to remove the /blog
• Blog Address – This should be the same as above
• 
• You will NOT be able to login to your blog until this move is done

3) Now backup/download  all your files in the /blog directory 4) Now you have to create the .htaccess file that will work the magic. The .htaccess file will do 2 things;

• Make sure to use www.thejimgaudet.com instead of thejimgaudet.com so Google doesn’t penalize me for duplicate content.

Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^thejimgaudet.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://thejimgaudet.com$1 [L,R=301]

• Permanantly redirect everything sent from the URL past /blog to the root domain with the filename attached thus not throwing a 404 and passing Google Page Rank to the new page.

RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/(.*)$ http://thejimgaudet.com/$1

5) Now upload all these files into the root of your domain. I am sure you have backed up your current site and are ready to take it down! 

Conclusion

Once the files are uploaded you will be able to login to your WordPress blog again. Once logged in you should be sure to rebuild your sitemap for Google. There is a plugin for that too.This was my process and it is working beautifully. If I missed anything plaeas let me know in the comments. Or if you have a better way to do this.