Avoiding duplicated content

[rabbitsmarties]

Before I begin... thanks to farcaster for working through a problem with my forum account!

Anyway, I recently purchased the website www.thenaturetrail.com -- which, by the way, is all about show rabbits. :D

The site was built with frontpage and is linked to a blog powered by blogger. I'd like to move the whole thing to wordpress without losing traffic or pagerank. I've been told that I should enlist the help of a plugin called redirection. I'm not exactly sure how it works but I bet I can figure it out. I've read quite a bit about migrating sites to wp on this forum and elsewhere.

But to get to the point, I would like to move the articles on the blog section of the site to the main site, and upload them as pages, dropping the "blog" idea. However, I don't want google to view this as duplicated content and be penalized in the search rankings. If I request that google, yahoo, bing, etc. to remove the blog from their index, will they regard it as fresh content if I upload the same articles to the new site?

As I mentioned, I have done a lot of research but would love a little one-on-one guidance because I really don't want to make any mistakes! The site is currently getting a lot of traffic.

Thanks so much!

Liz

[felgall]

I just had a quick look at what that plugin does and it should do exactly what you need.

What you have to do is to set up a 301 redirect from the current address of the page to where it can be found in wordpress. That will send everyone including the search engines who try to access the page at its old location to the new location. The 301 also tels the search engines that the move is permanent and to replace the old address with the new one in their results.

[rabbitsmarties]

Thanks.

Another question: why does BH automatically duplicate every add-on domain to your account by creating a subdomain on your primary account with the exact same content? Doesn't that put 2 websites out there with the exact same content? Or no, 4 different sites if you count www and non-www as being different. Is that supposed to be a good thing? Does it affect search engine rankings?

The site I bought happened to be also hosted at BH, so it's duplicated at a subdomain of her main domain. Should I redirect all those URL's too?

[felgall]

Another question: why does BH automatically duplicate every add-on domain to your account by creating a subdomain on your primary account with the exact same content?

They do that so that your site will function proplery. The stats are only accessible via that sybdomain.

As long as you don't link to it from anywhere no one but you will ever know it exists. If you are worried that someone might guess what it is called and link to it then give it a hard to guess name.

[rabbitsmarties]

Thanks again for your reply.

I would like to leave the old site up while I build the new one. Do you recommend building the new site at thenaturetrail.com/index or at an entirely different domain that I'm not using, and then importing it to the naturetrail domain once I get it transferred?

Also, since the site is currently hosted at BH, will the nameservers change when she transfers the domain to my bluehost account? If she transfers the domain but not the files, will the site still stay intact until I am ready to overwrite the old site?

[felgall]

The nameservers that the domain name server your visitor uses defines where their query goes when they enter a domain name. When you change the nameservers for your domain the domain name servers gradually pick up that change and start delivering your visitors to the hosting the new nameservers point to instead of to the hosting that the old nameservers point to. There will be a period of time while the change in the nameservers propagates across the various domain name servers where you'll have some visitors see the new hosting and other visitors still see the old hosting. You can select which of the two you visit at any time by adding an entry in the hosts file on your computer so as to bypass all the domain name servers and associate the domain directly with the IP address of whichever hosting you need it to point to at the moment.

The nameservers are not updated when you change registrar. You should not change registrar while any nameserver change is still propagating as it can cause problems. I know this from personal experience from changing registrar immediately after changing the nameservers and while when I viewed the information through the control pane it looked correct most domain name servers picked up a version where the second nameserver pointed to the old hosting and a month later I still had 10% of visitors reaching the old hosting instead of the new.

If you build the new site in a separate folder on the same hosting then to switch over it is just a matter of changing which folder the domain points to (its slightly more complicated if it is the main domain for the site but there you can either redirect the domain into the folder and delete the old pages or copy the folder content over the old version). I usually create any new versions on my own computer and then upload then when they are ready to go live.