Moving posts between blogs - advise needed re. to 301 redirect or delete

[SusanW]

Hi all,
I was a member of the brainstorming group but have opted out for two or three months as I'm travelling and have VERY sporadic, mobile internet (in Australia) and so can't join in on brainstorming sessions and can't really achieve much a lot of the time right now.

However, when I was in the group I got advise from Lynn regarding my websites and am now following that advise when I get the chance - cleaning up categories, tags and moving posts that aren't relevant to my new streamlined version of my old site.

My question is this: As I move old irrelevant blog posts on to my new niche sites where they are relevant, should I delete the posts from the old site keeping in mind that this site is still going be very much active and therefore I am trying to minimise damage re Google etc, or should I do individual 301 redirects to the new sites?

So far I've been doing the redirects, moving the posts all in to one category so that I can delete them at a later date easily, removing them from the sitemap and removing them from the tags.

Any advice much appreciated. Thanks. :)

[Lynn Terry]

Hi Susan,

This link is about changing your domain on a current site, but much of the information still applies and should approve super useful: https://savvypanda.com/blog/intermediate-level/how-to-change-domain-names-not-lose-seo.html

You do want to delete the original post (as it's irrelevant on that site, as you stated) and create a Permanent 301 Redirect for any content you move - from the original link to the new link.

Make sure you have a Custom 404 Error Page in place too, and monitor your stats closely for anything missed. Consider categories, tags, and anything else that may be linked to or ranking - if those change.

[SusanW]

Thanks Lynn. Would you use a plugin to do that? (I don't know if there's another way - .htaccess maybe?) and can you recommend any good ones? I've used one before but can't remember what it was. I've had a problem in the last couple of weeks with some adware on my sites that came from a plugin I think, so I'm a bit overly cautious right now after spending a whole day securing and cleaning up! :)

[JRLang]

I also want to add, unless you don't know, that Wordpress has Import/Export, which makes it much easier to move select or all posts from one blog to another. You can choose different parameters of what to export.

Just keep in mind that the publish date will be the same on the new site, in case that matters to you.

So, if you have a brand new domain, you would not want there to be 100 posts dated 3 years ago, so those have to be changed manually, unfortunately there is still no way to mass update publish dates in WP.

Good luck.

[SusanW]

Thanks JRLang. I've actually used that feature before, a long time ago. But I'd actually forgotten about it. I won't use it this time though - I'm going through doing one by one and making a few changes, checking links and adding more affiliate links so slow process, but worthwhile I think.

[Lynn Terry]

This redirect plugin comes highly recommended from many market leaders:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

You may check to make sure it will do what you need it to do first, of course. Otherwise you can create them manually via your .htaccess file.