Will html pages rank differently if I convert site to WP?

  • Resolved iseti

    (@iseti)


    14 years, 5 months ago

    Apologies if this topic has already been covered elsewhere. If it has, perhaps someone could direct me to the answer. Thanks.

    I have a couple of html sites (as well as quite a few WP ones). One of the html sites, in particular, has pages about medical conditions that rank extremely well, organically, in search engines.

    If I convert the site to a WordPress one, I’m concerned that the current html pages will lose their ranking.

    Is there a way I prevent this? For example, if my current page is https://www.XXX.com/bowelcancer.html, if I make that page https://www.XXX.com/bowelcancer on the WP will search engines regard it in the same way as the current html page and keep its position?

    Thanks for any help/advice/comments.

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  • Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    Eh… yes. It will be re-ranked, as it were. Two ways around this

    1) Redirect .html to pages without:

    Probably the best way to do it would be to use .htaccess so all your .html pages are redorected to the new ones. In that way, you will keep your SEO ranking until the new one is picked up.

    RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ https://www.XXX.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    That will take bowelcancer.html and basically lop off the .html part. So long as all your pages have the same name (sans .html). I call this the ‘best’ way because shorter URLs are better ??

    2) Change your permalinks to include .html

    See https://wordpresshero.com/tricks/add-html-extension-to-permalinks.html/ for details

    Thread Starter iseti

    (@iseti)

    Thanks very much for your suggestions, ipstenu. The second one seems to be the better option.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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