Redirectly.

Continuing to work on my Haw Creek site, I’m trying to make sure that all old material from the old site is updated, where needed, and copied over to the new site.

I was able to copy a significant amount over using the Backup Creator plugin.

The material that is being incorporated comes from old static web pages, WordPress pages, and the old Haw Creek blog.  I’m also incorporating most of the old material from the blog (Haw Creek) Out ‘n About.

To preserve existing links, all  of the old material will be left in place, with “redirects” to send visitors to the new location.  There are apparently a number of ways of doing the redirects.  The cleanest, from what I can tell is what is called a 301 redirect, which basically sends the visitor straight to the new location, which most people won’t even notice unless they look at the address bar.  The 301 redirect apparently also tells search bots that the path to follow is to the new place, which should be helpful in getting the new site’s placement in search engines.

I noticed this morning that the old page for Off Road RVs is #1 on Bing for search terms off road motorhomes and off road RVs. With the 301 redirect for that page in effect, clicking on the old link will take the visitor to the correct page on the new Haw Creek.

I’m sure that I’m going to miss something so I’m keeping track of what I’ve done so far with a site map.  Once I’m done with the incorporation of everything, the status information will be removed, but the site map will be retained in some form.