I am moving a well ranked eCommerce site to WordPress, but the old site has URLs that all end in .htm. I want to avoid breaking links, and avoid losing pagerank, but Wordpress removes periods from custom URLs, so it seems that ending in .htm will not be an option.
What is the best way to handle this situation in terms of SEO? Roughly preserve the sitemap with different URLs and 301 redirect? Use some kind of URL rewriting trick? Any help is much appreciated.
Check out this plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
You can also manually add redirects to your .htaccess I am not sure if that would work in your case though. Worth a shot, nevertheless. Make sure you put these rules after Wordpress' own block of rules
Redirect 301 /about.html http://yoururl.com/about/
Redirect 301 /contact.html http://yoururl.com/contact/
Related
The question is very simple and even tho I might get downvoted into oblivion for it, I can't find a good search query for this.
If I link images, stylesheets, scripts and other things with the full website url (http://url.tld/css/style.css) instead of path (css/style.css) , are the visitors affected negatively? Is there any difference?
The html page is on the same link as the resource, so we're not talking about external resources.
This only makes a difference if you change your domain name. You cannot simply transfer the scripts over but have to change each line or the include of those files then.
One small thing to keep in mind: Your string will be longer and so your file will be a very bit bigger in size but it doesn't really matter.
Either won't affect visitors. Specifying the protocol might cause problems in the future if your users can switch between http and https. Specifying the folder also means changes when you move the site. So best to use relative
I've just added a subdomain to my website, but can I point it to files in the main website with relative links? Like in the way that ../ goes back a folder, can you tell it to remove the first part of the url?
Also, I've just seen perhaps it's better putting the image folder as a subdomain too, is it worth doing this?
It's not possible to link to another domain using relative links, even if it is a subdomain. If you really want to do this you could make some kind of scripting helper to do that, but it would need to run on every page. With this you could run into problems on clients that have scripting disabled.
Putting images in a different subdomain is usually done to optimise loading speed. Browsers usually have a limited number of simultaneous requests to a single (sub)domain. By putting images on a separate (sub)domain you allow the browser to make more simultaneous requests and (in theory) allow your site to be loaded faster.
You can't use relative links, but you can use mod_rewrite to help you make a 'pseudo relative' link.
If your desired relative link were: href='folder/filename.typ'
then make it: href='root/folder/filename.typ'
in .htaccess enter: Rewriterule ^root/(.+)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1
You don't have to use 'root' of course, any word will do so long as it's unique in this context (i.e. not an actual folder name).
CAUTION: I found this thread looking for a solution myself. I've only just worked out this method. It does work on my site but I've not tested exhaustively yet.
Let's assume there's a site - http://domain.com
Now my job is to upload a CMS (Joomla, version 1.7). However, there's a big mess on FTP - already a Joomla (version 1.5), forum software, many unknown PHP files, many custom folders.
I can't simply upload Joomla 1.7, because I would have to delete that Joomla 1.5 file by file. So I've decided to upload CMS to subdomain, http://domain.com/subdomain, and display that content from http://domain.com. I don't want to simply redirect, because original URL must be kept.
How to do it? iframes are pretty outdated.
Iframes ? Stay away, use rewrite rules and keep the domain clean
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html
iFrames are still heavily used today and would be a fine solution for you. However there would be some problems with using an iframe that you should consider. My two cents fix the problem correctly by install Joomla properly, then try the using re-write rules all else fails you can use iframes.
Bad Points for iframe solution:
Using an iframe pointing to your site would probably be really bad for SEO. I don't think google or bing would look into the iframe thus you'd get 0 SEO value out of this solution.
URL link's would be ruined, if a user wanted to bookmark, tweet the url,
or even just send it to a friend they would have no way of doing that
because the url would be changing in the iframe not in the browser
bar.
No so bad points for iframes:
Sounds like this is an easy workaround for your problem so its not very time consuming.
iFrames are used all over the place on the internet and are fully supported by all major browsers.
I have a website that I was asked to "redesign".
The site itself was built and still maintained by FrontPage, so there are hundreds (hopefully not more) of HTML pages.
My main limitation is that I can't change any of the URLs because they have been there for over 10 years and have a lot of SEO value.
I want to rebuild the site in a smart way (CSS classes, dynamic pages, etc.) but also give the owner the ability to change content as he needs.
I was thinking of using WordPress, however I don't have experience with it and I'm not sure what it's limitations are.
My other issue, is that I need server side languages in order to enable this kind of site, but I don't know how to do that without changing the URLs.
And after I deal with all that, is there any way around manually handling every single page?
Any suggestions, or pushing in a certain direction are all welcome.
Feel free to provide new, meaningful, URLs but make 100% sure that you configure correct 301 redirects from all old URLs to the new ones.
You may change the permalinks from your WordPress admin section once you've written the .htaccess file. The old links of the static pages can then be redirect to new pages and links using 301 redirects which won't negatively affect the existing PageRank and SEO; see How to redirect a webpage
I have a website with a 'home' link like many do and I am wondering whether I should do:
Home
or
Home
Obviously my homepage is contained in the index.html file. I have the first option implemented right now and it seems to work, but I am not sure what the preferred practice is or if there are any drawbacks to one or the other.
I appreciate any help!
Using href="/" may require the browser to submit two requests. The first to "/" which is redirected at the server to "index.html". If it's not a 302 redirect, then there may be some potential search indexing implications, though that's subjective voodoo that may not apply.
The other issue is if your server just returns the contents of index.html for "/". When that is true your site will have two different URLs for the same resource. Not having canonical URLs for the same reference will affect your search performance.
While linking to "/" may offer some flexibility in that you can change it in the future, the difference between index.html and index.php is usually a significant architectural change and "future proofing" against is pointless. If you're switching to a dynamic site in the future, you'll be updating all your home links anyway...so no need to optimize for what won't ever happen.
Of the two href="/index.html" is the better choice. href="./" will not work reliable because of the dot.
href="/" is the most flexible because it allows you to change to a different index page (index.php, index.asp, etc) later without updating your code.