Using Wordpress permalinks with no posts attached

Question

I am moving an old Drupal 4 installation to Wordpress 3, and rather than trying to go through the pain of moving the thousands of posts over, my plan is to leave the old site running on a subdomain (old.site.com).

I'm able to set up the wordpress permalinks to look like the URLs the Drupal site's pathauto module was generating, but now I need to create permalinks for all those old posts that don't exist on the new site. For example:

• http://site.com/author-name/title-of-post exists on the old Drupal site.
• I want to create a permalink in Wordpress with the same URL, then have it forward to http://old.site.com/author-name/title-of-post
• This way any existing Google indices that point to the existing post will still work, and (hopefully) we don't lose any Google prominence

What is the best way to do this? Thanks in advance.

Bonus Question: Does anyone actually know how this would affect SEO?

Answer 1

I would add the following plugin:

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

And then create blank pages or posts in WordPress to get the link structure you want. The plugin adds an option to the post edit screen to set a 301 redirect to your other URL. That should provide the mechanics of what you want to do.

As for SEO, it's suboptimal for the new site since spiders, visitors, and bookmarks will all end up on the old site. I would use the above as a temporary solution and slowly copy/paste the content over or figure out a clever database import to move it over. In the long run, that will be better for you.