Moving my blog to a new platform - SEO perspective

Question

I have a blog in a Community server based platform, and I would like to move it over to Wordpress. Since it's a community I'm already part of, I don't want to lose that community regular readers, so I am planning to cross post every new post I make at the community server's platform. I'll post the title of the blog, along with a short description, and a link to the post on wordpress. How is that going to affect SEO? Anything I should be aware of? I care only for the SEO of my new blog at wordpress, the other posts at the community server platform are there just for the record.

Answer 1

After changing CMS systems the biggest problems is the usrl`s , the search engines send the users to old links and they get 404 pages[or to your old blog] and you lose them.

If you can create redirects to the new WP website to lose less traffic and visitors as possible.

About the posts that will stay on the old platform "just for the record" if you use them again in your new site you can get punished for duplicate content.

Answer 2

That's SEO suicide. You're essentially starting from scratch SEO wise by doing this. You need to migrate your old content to your new site and do 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs. That way all of the links and any rankings Google has assigned to your pages will be "transferred" to your new pages and preserving your rankings.

Answer 3

Agreed on the 301 redirect. That will preserve SEO strength. Also, I would ensure that you have canonical references TO the new links that you want to keep rankings for. Without the canonical, Google will arbitrarily pick the article it ranks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_canonicalization

Answer 4

If the old site have a nice amount of traffic, posting the links from the old to the new site will help to search engines find your new site faster.

My question to you wold be what going to happen to the old site ? how do you pretend to use it and for how long ?

I think you must set a time frame for each steps in order to avoid a dependence (new site depending on the old site)

1 - Make sure your readers and new users know about the move, notify them by email, on your newsletter or with a banner on the old site.

2- Migrate all your subscribers, users, etc to the new site

3- On the old site DO NOT POST A REL CANONICAL LINK or a 301 REDIRECTION OF ANY KIND unless you move all your posts from the old site to the new one, otherwise you are saying to search engines that some content had been moved to the new site or that some content is the same to something that can't be found on your new site.

4- Make sure that the description of a post and the link on the old site looks good to your readers without exactly copy the first few lines of a post on the new site, use something different otherwise you will be affecting the old site and later that will have a domino effect on your site.

5- Make use of smart links from the old site to the new site, avoid linking to the posts on the new site with links like "read more" or "click here".