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Gina Bégin
Courses Plus Student 8,613 Points301 Redirects & Keeping Google Rank (Transfer Domain to New Site)
Hi All — not sure if there is help on here for this, so I thought I would ask since it involves coding!
I've been trying to understand the process of taking a Blogger site (with custom URL: http://outdoorwomensalliance.com) and moving it to a self-hosted Wordpress (WP) site with the same URL (transferring it to the new WP site) without losing Google/SEO ranking. Our nonprofit is not crazy high in the rankings, but enough in our niche that we often come out in the top search results and we don't want to lose what we have.
I have 3 questions:
Is this the correct process in 2015? I found this article from 2014, and I'm wary because of the date as well as some of the people having troubles, so I wanted to see if people who have more experience can weigh in on the validity of the coding and process from Amir Agarwal: http://www.labnol.org/internet/blogger-custom-domain-to-wordpress/28120/
Is there a limit to URLs that can be redirected? Additionally, I've read on here that some people were concerned about the number of 301 URL redirects hurting their SEO ranking. We have between 250-300 pages (blog entries and etc.), so I didn't know how that would come into play.
SEO Penalty for Duplicate Content? Would we need to take down the Blogger site in order for the new Wordpress site to not be penalized for duplicate content?
This has been a really confusing process for us, but it's the last piece of the puzzle with getting things on a better site after 7 years on Blogger!
Thanks so much for any help with this!
4 Answers
Simon Chercka
23,809 PointsHi Gina,
- The process is correct. Basically you are doing the following:
- changing the DNS of your domain so it points to your wordpress server instead of blogger server.
- installing wordpress on your webhosting
- installing a wordpress plugin to import content from blogger
- shutting down the blogger blog to avoid duplicate content (DC).
I would wait to change the DNS till your WordPress site is up and running since otherwise the site will be unreachable if you're not finished installing and importing by the time DNS kicks in. For help changing DNS you can contact your domain and/or hosting provider. They can tell you which records need to point where since this can be quite tricky.
Here you are confusing the term 'number of redirects'. It means how many times you redirect one specific URL, not how many URLs you redirect in a site. So it doesn't matter if you redirect 10.000 URLs but it can have an affect if you keep changing a specific URL many times and adding a redirect each time. Understand? Last I heard the recommended number of redirects without penalty was 5 times. You are just moving once and that is only one redirect. So no problems for you.
Yes the old site is duplicate content which will damage your ranking. This is covered well in the article you mentioned, where he says either delete it or just make it private so it cannot be indexed.
Gina Bégin
Courses Plus Student 8,613 PointsThanks, Simon Chercka! So, we have our WP site unlisted while our Blogger site is still live. It's being hosted by GoDaddy, and we used WP's import feature to bring in content from Blogger. Someone (in another forum, because this one was unanswered for a few days — thank you for coming in and answering!) said that all we really needed to do after what we've done so far is to just reassign our URL to the new site (so changing the DNS, right?). This way, anyone who has linked to us over the years will still have a live link — no 404's (dead links) or loss in SEO ranking?
Simon Chercka
23,809 PointsRight, if the domain name is the same on the old and the new site that's correct. Old links will continue to work when you change DNS over.
However your URL structure will need to be identical with the old one for this to work.
So if it was www.oldsite.com/category/date/postname then it has to be the same on the new site, or your old links will hit a 404 - obviously. This is essentially the whole reason why you would use 301 redirects. To grab all the old links...
Gina Bégin
Courses Plus Student 8,613 PointsSomeone mentioned that because all of our old URLs end with .html and Wordpress doesn't support URLs with .html on the end, all of our links will actually become 404s. So this means we actually will have to do a 301 redirect, then?
Or do you know if there is a setting in WP that allows for the URL structure to support .html (or should we ditch .html and just go ahead and do the 301 redirect)?
Thanks, Simon Chercka
Simon Chercka
23,809 PointsDefinitely ditch the .html endings.
But you should be able to create a 301 redirect from
site.com/page.html -> site.com/page
Either with a WordPress redirect plugin or manually in your htaccess file. Quite easy to test since you can just type in the old URL and see if it redirects to the new.
Gina Bégin
Courses Plus Student 8,613 PointsThanks for your help (and sorry for the late reply here, Simon Chercka — I haven't been on here for a bit). I think I would feel more comfortable setting it up myself in the htaccess file (because I don't always trust plugins), but I'm not quite sure what I should be searching for on Google for instructions on how to do that; just "htaccess 301 redirects?" Or should I be using different keywords than that (I've never done this before, so I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for).