Recently, I have been organizing my blog posts- doing a series of posts migration from one blog to another.
When migrating blog posts from place to another, you would need to implement 301 redirects to ensure:
- ensure search engines do not arrive at 404 pages. For Google, their bots would assume that your site has issues and would send less searches to your site.
- ensure any backlinks are preserved through directing to a new site
- Avoid high bounce rate as users who arrive from search engines may bounce off
With Thesis theme (version 2 and above), it comes with a 301 redirect option whereby upon implementation, it will auto redirect to the new page.
There are many reported errors by those who implement redirects using plugin or other means. Some also manually configure in their htaccess redirect which may slow down your site (and according to some who have done it, it does not work and still give a lot of 404 error).
If you own a Thesis template (version 2.3 and above), when you click “Edit” on the old post, scroll down till you see a 301 redirect.
Key in the url of the new page at the “Redirect url”:
Do note that this option involves redirecting one individual post to another. The post still exists but the moment you update your post and click to view post, you would automatically and immediately be brought to the new url.
As this involves individual redirection one post to another, it will not work if:
- you are changing permanlinks of all your blog posts. Mostly to have posts with dates to no dates. Example http://yoursite/2017/08/08/titleoftheblogpost/ t0 http://yoursite/titleoftheblogpost/ . For this type of change, you need to download a plugin to help you.
- If you are migrating your entire blog domain from one domain to another. If you are still keeping the old domain, you may open the “Edit” function of each post to redirect.
However, I would recommend that you do not delete your old blog post but instead just input a 301 redirect to them. This is because the impact on your site traffic would be minimal, but of course eventually the site would be less visited as the time spent on site decreases (since visitors are automatically redirected to your new url).
It is a painful one time cleanup exercise but once you are done with it, you would be able to start anew.