First off, CONGRATULATIONS!

>>wordpress URI from example.com/wordpress

That's key. I always forget about the site setting in the DB.

I also like to

- take the site offline (Maintenance Mode plugin)

- get a database dump and do a grep for any absolute URLs using the old format and for any relative URLs that might get broken.

- when it's all done, run Xenu link checker or some such.

- sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and make sure they know whether you want the "www" or not and what you canonical domain is. Also it will help find 404s and such found during a crawl.

- just in case there are some inbound links out there somehow, I would add a 301 redirect for all URLs to /wordpress/ subdir site

- finally, make sure that any existing URLs from the old site return the proper thing (404 if you want them to disappear, 301 if they have a corresponding page on the new site, etc).

Good luck!

Thanks for the advice, ergophobe, the site is up and running and working great!

Just have one question, Google still has my old site URL's showing up in the index, and I know I should do an individual 301 redirect for each of these pages, to the newly re-designed pages, but there is over 500 pages, that is quite a few to try and re-direct!

Is there an easier way to go about doing the 301 redirects?

I wonder if I can redirect all the old site design's pages to just my main homepage. Even though there looking for something specific within my site, they would get the homepage, but I would probably prefer that to them seeing my crappy old site or 404 errors, as some pages have now been deleted.

If the filenames stay the same and it's just the directory structure that's changed, check out RedirectMatch which can do a "bulk" redirect using regular expressions.

search for RedirectMatch [google.com]

[httpd.apache.org...]

Added after re-reading:

>>I wonder if I can redirect all the old site design's pages to just my main homepage.

If you do a site search here, you'll find a lot of advice saying not to do that with the homepage.

[edited by: Marcia at 2:03 am (utc) on June 28, 2008]

Thanks Marcia,

But unfortunately with my old site, everything was badly designed and out of place.

From what I get, the redirect match is best used for redirecting subdirectories.

Some of my pages were in the root, and others in there own subdirectories and this still just seems like a mess trying to figure out how to re-direct my old site to the new one.

I think Tedster's advice in a similar situation is to look at your stats. Find your pages that are bringing you good traffic (high volume or high quality), redirect those to the appropriate place, then return proper 404s for the low-traffic, low-value pages and let Google figure it on the next crawl.

I just did something along those lines and it was a good compromise, though if I recall, Tedster's logic wasn't about saving labor, but about not wanting too many redirects fed to Google all at once.

I'm gonna give him a holler and get it straight, before someone goes ruining his site on my bad advice. Stay tuned.

That is the approach I've been taking for the past year and a half with clients, and it has worked beautifully. We see relatively short adaptation time from Google when the urls stay on the same domain (a few weeks) and a bit longer when a new domain name is involved - more like 2 months.

The challenge is that redirects are often used in deceptive practices, so Google cannot afford to just notice a redirect and nod in agreement. They need to check over each one from a trust perspective, and that checking can take a while. But a 404 is a relatively easy thing to check for trust, and so is a link, compared to a 301.

So I only applied the 301 to urls that were key - they had backlinks, or lots of Google Search traffic, or they showed signs in the server of being direct entry pages. It's also important for urls with backlinks to send them to their final url in one step -- not through a chain of redirects. So you'll want to be aware of that since you are doing a lot of things at once, here.

Remember that the "canonical" redirect is also a 301, so the best thing to do is to redirect in one step:

oldomain.com/blog/filename >> www.newdomain.com/filename

In the Google Search forum we regularly get reports of 3 to 6 months for everything to sort out with sitewide 301's, even within the same domain. Introducing a new domain into the mix makes it even more likely that there will be a bump in the road with Google -- but the approach I've been using can soften that bump.

Getting some backlinks changed to be direct to the new URL is another best practice here. A courtesy note to the webmasters involved usually is all it takes to give that level ov validity to your new domain.

This is not a simple process, but it is designed to help preserve Google traffic as much as possible, rather than to be easy. The paradox is that by "squeezing" on existing traffic and trying to preserve every bit, the actual drop can be longer and more severe!

Thanks ergophone, tedster.

I think I'll just go over my logs, find out which pages get the most traffic and manually 301 redirect these.

This won't be too hard, and the one's that don't get much traffic, that's OK if a few people see the old site.

Cheers.