SEO impact of migrating a site to WordPress?

March 18, 2009 9:57 AM

I want to move content from a site created in FrontPage to a WordPress-based site. What kind of SEO implications can this have?

I run a marketing consultancy and have a client who has a ten-year-old site that was created in (and continues to be managed with) FrontPage 98. A decade ago it was an acceptable site but is now insufficient for my client's image. His web-based business really needs better navigation and a more polished look. My client insists on having complete control over updating the content of the site and I have finally convinced him to consider moving over to WordPress, which will solve both the aesthetic problem on my end and the control concerns on his end. My concern is this: he is pretty well-established in terms of SEO (specifically with Google) and I wonder how much it is possible to mitigate the SEO impact of such a change. I don't know if I would do the work myself or if I would farm it out, but I'm wondering what the impact might be and how to prevent loss of ranking if at all possible. Would ensuring that the existing pages (i.e., www.myclient.com/services.htm) stay in the same location have any bearing (for backlinks or any other purpose)? What if I replicate all keywords in the same places? I understand the very basics of SEO but haven't dealt with trying to move information before.

What pitfalls might I encounter? What questions am I not asking? Any help would be much appreciated!

posted by mireille to computers & internet (3 comments total)

- All in One SEO Pack

- Google XML Sitemaps
posted by Webbster at 11:32 AM on March 18

You might want to keep the title tags of the pages the same. You can override the automatic titles that WordPress assigns with various plugins--search the WordPress.org plugins section for "title tag."

It might also be helpful to keep the URLs similar, if you think they're contributing to search engine placement. For example, www.myclient.com/speedy-gerbils.html will supposedly rank higher for "speedy gerbils" than would www.myclient.com/products.html. WordPress automatically creates a URL for each post and page, but you can edit it to some degree--look immediately below the field where you type the main heading for the post.

More evolved geeks than I can tell you how to redirect old links to the proper pages.

Keeping the copy more or less the same will, of course, also be helpful, as could preserving any H1 tags or bolded phrases that include keywords.
posted by PatoPata at 11:40 AM on March 18

A few things:

- if the old site is only a handful of pages, do permanent redirects (using apache directives or whatever web server you're on) for all the old pages to the new. This ensures no 404 errors and Google should dutifully move from the old locations to the new ones in a matter of weeks.

- if the old site is many, many pages and you can't do redirects, reconsider jumping to wordpress. If the URLs have to remain at the exact same locations, you might want to try dreamweaver with its includes feature. I've designed sites where all the page chrome (logo, nav, sidebars) couldn't be edited (screwed up) by a client, and they just got to edit the text areas of a page. Dreamweaver should recognize most all modern CSS and let the owner still get a WYSIWYG editing interface.

- Make sure none of the old pages result in a 404 from Google, otherwise they'll drop out of the index. If you can't do server-side redirects at least insert empty pages in the old locations to bounce to the new entries.
posted by mathowie at 11:52 AM on March 18