0

I have had a blog for around 4 years now that has gained some success and gets tons of residual and organic traffic. I am using an outdated version of BlogEngine.NET and we are going to switch to WordPress. Currently, our blog is at ourwebsite.com/blog, and I don't really want to mess with our web server. I setup a new server just for WordPress and instead of dealing with proxies and things that are above my head, the new blog will be at blog.oursite.com. I am trying to figure out the best way to go about doing this. We value our search engine rankings very much so, as that is where 90% of our traffic comes from. Would I be best off:

  1. Importing all of the old blog posts from oursite.com/blog to blog.oursite.com and then redirecting all of the articles, categories, authors, pages and tags to the new blog and giving up the direct links to our current site.
  2. Keeping all of our current articles as they are, and only add new content to the new blog.oursite.com and just kind of let the old blog float around our site.
Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

I would move everything and redirect you don't want to be splitting traffic between /blog and the blog subdomain. You can run Xenu link sleuth against your current site to get a CSV file of all your URL's. Then after your subdomain blog is up with your articles imported and permalinks set. Run Xenu again and use Excel to easily create your redirects and copy/paste into your .htaccess. Use 301's not 302's.

You don't have to give up all the direct links to your blog. Just export your referral traffic from Analytics, also check what Webmaster tools shows. That plus the redirects you'll setup in your .htaccess file should keep most of the traffic coming to your site. 301's don't pass all the link juice but does pass some, and you'll at least be sending visitors to the pages they were looking for.

Improve this answer
2
  • This will take more work, but it's definitely the right way to go. You recycle existing backlinks/PR/traffic, and perhaps equally importantly, it's a security best-practice to take down old, outdated, and no-longer maintained web apps. Keeping an abandoned web app on your server is a sure-fire way of getting hacked in the long run. Not only are you not keeping it patched up, but because you no longer maintain and view it, you could get hacked and not know about it for months, and by that time the damage could be quite severe.
    – Lèse majesté
    Dec 29, 2012 at 6:07
  • @Lèsemajesté very true, leaving an app left on a server is asking for trouble. Especially if it shares the same database as your new application on the sub-domain. Take the time to setup the re-directs and have a peace of mind knowing you have one less app to maintain and worry about future XSS and other injection attacks.
    – Anagio
    Dec 29, 2012 at 11:05

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.