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 th 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/$15) 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.
Related Posts
- Remove WordPress Revisions and PostMeta
- Costa Rica SEO | A good of example of something that is much easier said...than done!
- Intro to SEO Tuesday
- HowTo | Schedule your Posts in WordPress
- Scheduling your Blog Posts
I have been thinking about this moving WordPress problem. I have a site I wll need to move and change domains.
Did you have any problems with url in your post for pictures, etc. It seesm they get inserted with the full URL instead of a relative URL.
In your case http://www.thejimgaudet.com/blog/image.jpg
would need to be:
http://www.thejimgaudet.com/image.jpg
or better yet a relative URL /image.jpg
Did you have to update any links like this?
If you have relative links then they will work fine, but so will the permalinks. The way the .htaccess file passes the string is like this;
anything pass the /blog/ such as /blog/wp-content/uploads/image.jpg would be come /wp-content/uploads/image.jpg
After I ran these steps I didn't need to do anything. I even checked my links on Digg and Reddit to test..
I am staying on the same domain, but this will work for moving to another domain as well.
I didn't know google penalizes you for using thejimgaudet.com instead of http://www.thejimgaudet.com.
nice article, too.
Well, what happens is you can get two copies in the index, with and without the www then that would count at dup content…
Good article. When building links, quality is of utmost importance. This is often overlooked by webmasters and SEO’s. Often you will see a site with just a handful of backlinks rank higher than one with thousands. This is because of quality and a natural linking pattern.
Thanks Ollie, I agree with you about the links. Without paying I am trying to get my links through networking. I feel I learn from someone and interact with them online and this shows I am not someone hunting for links in blogs. Over time I hope to get a few people sending me links, and they will be relevant to my site since I am networking with people like me. DMOZ helps for now, but I hear that is going away soon..
Matt Cutts (http://www.mattcutts.com), the head of Google's Webspam Team, specifically recommends *against* using WordPress from the root of your domain; you can check out the video from WordCamp SF 2009 that is on his site for an explanation, and he has entries in his blog against this practice as well. As you can see from visiting his site, he follows his own advice.
Matt Cutts (http://www.mattcutts.com), the head of Google's Webspam Team, specifically recommends *against* using WordPress from the root of your domain; you can check out the video from WordCamp SF 2009 that is on his site for an explanation, and he has entries in his blog against this practice as well. As you can see from visiting his site, he follows his own advice.