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You may have noticed that we have moved the SEOptimise blog away from the subdomain blog.seoptimise.com and redirected this to www.seoptimise.com/blog.

The reason for this change is because inbound links to subdomains are treated differently to links which point to the main subdomain. Google generally has less trust in subdomains because it’s very easy for people to setup websites such as mysubdomain.blogspot.com. In this case rather than dominating the SERP’s because of blogspot.com’s overall link popularity, Google will value inbound links to this subdomain fully, but the weight of inbound links to the overall domain will have less influence towards rankings.

Keeping all content on the www version of the domain ensures that all inbound link juice is consolidated into a single subdomain, having a greater impact towards strengthening the overall domain. For example, external links to www.seoptimise.com/blog will help to lift rankings on www.seoptimise.com, whereas inbound links to blog.seoptimise.com will benefit the blog subdomain but have less impact to the overall rankings throughout the www version of the website.

There were some negative issues to consider, such as loss of Technorati rankings, change of URL’s for social media bookmarking and a temporary risk of losing rankings, but some reassuring advice from Jane Copland in SEOmoz’s Q&A (link only works for PRO content members) helped to show the decision to use a single www subdomain is clearly the best long-term strategy.

Below we have listed the steps we followed (and recommend) to migrate the WordPress blog to a new subfolder, whilst considering any SEO implications encountered during move:

1) Backup, Move & Restore
Follow these steps to backup the database, install WordPress in the new location and reset the WordPress URL’s to set this up in the new location. Also copy across any additional files such as plugins, themes, uploaded images and updated htaccess for the new permalink structure.

2) URL 301 Redirection
This is to ensure that no broken links or 404 errors are encountered during migration.

The following .htaccess code automatically 301 redirects all old previous subdomain URL’s to the new subfolder structure:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.seoptimise\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]

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