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Moving old blog to WordPress - best way to do this?

by Scotch196
4 replies
  • WEB DESIGN
    • |
Hi - have two questions I'm hoping can be answered:

1. I have an existing blog that's a few years old, built using Easy Blogs software. I want to move the entire blog (about 250-300 posts) to WordPress. The existing blog is badly optimised and consists of a home page that shows the four most recent posts, about nine category pages, and about 40 pages archived by month. These are all HTML pages. Individual posts do not exist as separate pages, so have not been indexed.

If I import all posts into a new WordPress blog, add relevant meta tags and immediately publish all posts, some going back to 2005, will Google frown on this, seeing it as a possible spam site with scraped content?

2. My current hosting set-up for the existing site and blog don't allow me to change .htaccess. So if I want to redirect the existing blog's home page plus archived material like category and month pages, I'll need to use HTML or javascript redirect. But I've read that this is also not good and could be penalized by the SEs. Any advice on this type of redirect? Any other suggestions or advice on what I'm trying to do would be most welcome.

Many thanks,
Scotch
#blog #importing #moving #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author tyroneshum
    Hi Scotch,

    There may not be any easy way to import all your blog posts into Wordpress, except to have a customised script written for you. If you are interested I can try to assist you with writing a script, so just PM me.

    Thanks.
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    • Profile picture of the author Scotch196
      Hi Tyrone,

      Thanks for the offer. However, I have all my existing blog's posts saved in RSS feeds that I can import directly into WordPress in a matter of minutes.
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  • Profile picture of the author mywebwork
    Aloha Scotch and welcome to the forum (and welcome to Tyrone too)!

    Would the current directory structure of your Easy Blog setup be possible to emulate in WordPress by modifying permalinks?

    Using Permalinks WordPress Codex

    Of course your lack of ability to modify .htaccess (and probably httpd.conf as well) makes this difficult, if not impossible. Have you considered moving to a server that you have more control over?

    The way I see it (and my expertise is more on the tech side than the SEO side) you should be good to go with Google the closer you can mimic your existing directory structure. With no ability to modify critical configuration files right now this becomes a challenging task, to say the least. Other than a fancy script (or big bunch of pages) using PHP redirects I'm not sure how you'd accomplish it. I think the time has come to consider another hosting plan.

    Google must have to deal with sites moving to different hosts all the time,and they are supposed to be ranking them in terms of the value of information. You have original material under your domain that will still be on the same domain under WordPress as it was in Easy Blog. If they can find it in the same domain I doubt they will see it as duplicate copy.

    Best of luck

    Bill
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    • Profile picture of the author Scotch196
      Hi Bill,

      Thanks for the welcome and also for your advice. I'm not too clued up on the tech side, so apologies for any gibberish.

      My website, including the blog, is hosted with Site Build It, so I can't modify any server configuration files. The site is well-established, has good rankings in the SERPs and Google PR of 5, so definitely don't want to move the entire site at this stage.

      The blog itself is almost like a "fake" blog and resides on the SBI servers as just another bunch of HTML pages, comprising a main page of the 4 most recent posts, plus category pages and monthly archive pages, all of which are HTML. These pages are updated by Easy Blogs each time I add a post, after which I re-upload the main page plus current month (eg 200905.html) and all category pages. The RSS feed is also updated to reflect any new posts.

      So the way I understand there are no permalinks as each post does not exist as a separate entity. That's why I'm keen to switch to WP, as I'll suddenly have close to 300 posts that can be SE optimised and indexed.

      The WP blog has been set up as a sub-domain and will reside on a different server. My main site is domain-name.com and the blog will be blog.domain-name.com. I understand this means the SEs see the subdomain, when mapped like this, as an integral part of the main website.

      I think I must just take the plunge, move everything over to the WP blog, remove content on the existing blog pages and replace with a brief explanation that links to the new blog. That way any visitors and spiders will have a route to the new location of the content and I don't have to worry about redirects being frowned upon.

      There will be some loss of traffic from visitors who were finding the blog, mainly via image search, but in the longer term I feel this will be worth it once all the individual posts are indexed and start appearing in SERPs as long-tail search terms.

      My main concern remains Google's response to the sudden appearance of 300 new posts but I'm hoping they'll pick up that this is existing content on the domain that's being presented differently.

      Thanks again for the help,

      Scotch
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