Blog Migration
I have been quiet during the last few days as I was playing with WordPress Mu as a solution for containing several WordPress sites, with one management interface. This is an amazing product, and following my implementation, about 18 blogs are already there.
My site required some special handling. As you know, my URL was http://www.tournament.org.il/run up until now, however, looking up – you will see the address http://run.tournament.org.il in the address bar. This required some special handling, and I hope it will do no evil to my page ranks. The previous change did horrible things to it…
So – using Apache redirection methods, as can be found in this link, was the easiest solution to maintain the whole URL with only a minor shift.
A very easy solution to preserve the pagerank as well as the search engine positions is to redirect all requests from the old URL to the new one using 301 status HTTP codes.
This can be simply done with .htaccess on the old server.
If the URI remains the same then a single rewrite rule can do it all.
If the URI changed then you need a rewrite rule for each old URL.
In both ways, redirect with 301 status code and be sure that after a while, the PR and the SERPS will move from the old pages to the new ones.
Small note: This need to be done before it is too late. The sooner – the better.