Redirecting pages on wordpress hosted sites
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Hi,
We have recently moved our site to wordpress and are having a problem where people who have previously linked to us are now getting 404s on those links, so we have lost a lot of organic search kudos. For example, our contacts page used to be :http://ebka.org/about_contacts.php
This is now at
but anyone clicking on the first link just gets a big 404 message. Its also present in our google site links as the original url.
Is there a way to redirect old pages to the new urls, or we will be losing a lot of google rank, upsetting a lot of users and generally looking like we are making a mess of things, all because we have chosen wordpress as our new system.
hopefully yours
Nick Holmes (EBKA Webmaster)
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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It seems you’ve recently moved from a non-WordPress site, therefore it’s possible that the permalink structure if different than the one on WordPress.com. WordPress.com automatically sends notifications to Google with every post and page update. The search engines can take 4-6 weeks or more to add any new sites. Read this page for more information about WordPress.com and Search Engines.
Follow the instructions in our FAQ to verify your site with Google:
http://support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/ -
So what you are saying is that there is no solution from wordpress to maintain previous, search rank improving, organic, links to the site, correct?
Is there any reason why wordpress will not provide a solution in this space? Even for a premium upgraded account?
Nick
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The structure of your previous site is completely different than your blog at WordPress.com. Which means that the links indexed by Google simply don’t exist anymore. Verifying your site at Google will verify that you are indeed the owner of the new domain. Then follow the steps below:
Ask Google to crawl a page or site:
1: On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2: On the Dashboard, under Crawl, click Fetch as Google.
3: In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check.
4: In the dropdown list, select Web. (You can select another type of page, but currently we only accept submissions for our Web Search index.)
5: Click Fetch. Google will fetch the URL you requested. It may take up to 10 or 15 minutes for Fetch status to be updated.
6: Once you see a Fetch status of “Successful”, click Submit to Index, and then click one of the following:
* To submit the individual URL to Google’s index, select URL and click Submit. You can submit up to 500 URLs a week in this way.
* To submit the URL and all pages linked from it, click URL and all linked pages. You can submit up to 10 of these requests a month. -
Yes, I am aware of how to handle links in google webmaster tools, I am a webmaster for a major UK website, previously structuring fundamental parts of their SEO strategy, so I know my way around all those aspects for google, bing and yandex (although not relevant here). This is why I am asking about the redirects, because it is the only way to maintain the page rank of the links previously pointing to the site.
If someone could just answer my question
“Is there any reason why wordpress will not provide a solution in this space? Even for a premium upgraded account?”
…as it seems a ‘not insignificant’ flaw in the system for anyone considering moving their site to wordpress hosted by wordpress. Had this come up before we might have thought more about hosting elsewhere.
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“Is there any reason why wordpress will not provide a solution in this space? Even for a premium upgraded account?”
This is something that has to be fixed on Google’s end because their search results still contain old indexed permalinks. WordPress does redirect if the permalink is similar, like http://ebka.org/contact redirects to http://ebka.org/contact-us but other than that the permalink needs to be same.
I fully understand the frustration but in your case it might be best to follow the steps in my previous reply on how to let Google crawl your site again.
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Yes. I do understand what you have said and I have done what you suggested, I did it yesterday before I sent this email. My issue is not what Google points to, my issue is that Google find pages on other people’s pages that point to the previous urls on our site. Now pretty much every website on the Internet has the capacity to redirect these urls, which create page rank for a site, on to new urls. This is so that page rank can be maintained and a site can remain at the top of search results for various keywords found in the links from those sites. This is how search rankings work, people link to your site and that gives you ‘credit’ on those pages and so your page turns up higher in search results. If nobody links to your site or those links go to broken pages (404s) then you lose the credit you have acquired through years of people linking to those pages.
What you are in effect telling me is that I need to throw away any idea of search rank acquired over time to those pages where the links have changed their address.
I am asking why is something so basic and easy missing from a professional tool like wordpress premium.
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Now pretty much every website on the Internet has the capacity to redirect these urls, which create page rank for a site, on to new urls.
No they don’t, 404 pages are made for situations like these. If the URL is incorrect it won’t redirect. It happens basically to any website, like CNN.com or Facebook.com. Letting Google re-crawl your site will fix the permalinks in their search results so visitors won’t bump into a 404 page.
If you prefer full redirection control, you might want to consider setting up a self-hosted WordPress.org blog instead of a WordPress.com blog. Here you can install plugins that let you manage redirects. We have hosting recommendations at the following link if you are interested.
To clear up any confusion, WordPress.com and WordPress.org are two different entities. Please check out the following link to learn the differences: http://support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/
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I was not suggesting that 404s will automatically redirect, I was saying that old urls ‘should’ be manually redirected by the site owner. This tool in its hosted model does not allow for that.
I can not go around everyone’s site that links to our site and tell them to change their links. Google will still find those links to our site.
I appreciate you have told me that I can use a self hosted version which has plugins to handle redirection, I did actually know that already, but as I have already paid for a year of hosting at wordpress.com then you will understand why that’s not ideal for me.
You still seem to avoid my repeated question of “Why” this feature of redirection is not supplied on the hosted model of wordpress.
Lastly, I’m confused about why you have brought up wordpress.org vs wordpress.com, I didn’t mention that, as far as I am aware. But it does bring up an interesting point, on that page it says under the hosted model “There’s no need to install plugins.” Which is clearly not the case here, maybe it should say “There’s no need to install plugins, for the subset of functionality we have decided to offer you”.
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You still seem to avoid my repeated question of “Why” this feature of redirection is not supplied on the hosted model of wordpress.
The reason why we don’t have this feature is because it isn’t highly requested by our users. We’ve registered your suggestion and will keep it in mind for future features and updates! Also, don’t forget the ideas forum, where you can discuss your suggestion with the WordPress.com community: https://en.forums.wordpress.com/forum/ideas
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