Quick SEO and Wordpress question. Please help.
 

Okay here's the situation:

I have a domain that I've been playing with SEO on for a few years. Let's say it's mydomain.com

It's done pretty well, and I'm getting better at it, so I decided to convert the static html pages I've always used to a Wordpress blog. It's more or less a blog layout anyway. For bulding testing purposes I've located that at mydomain.com/blog

I've moved all the old content fromt he static pages in to Word Press and now want to put the Wordpress live to enjoy all the SE traffic I've built up to that domain.

Question: Can I just use the .htaccess to redirect to the /blog or will that be recognized as a redirect and cost me in terms of SE traffic? Would I be better served by actually moving the directory for the blog up to the root?

Thanks.

Wordpress can be installed in a subdomain and still appear like it's working from the root. There is a tutorial on the Wordpress site on how to do this.

You will have to 301 redirect all the URL's of the old static site to the new Wordpress generated URLs to keep your rankings.

-A

Yeah it appears as it's working from the root via .htaccess rewrite I believe.

To keep the rankings then I have to redirect index.html to index.php?

just to the site wide redirect from / to /blog/ 301 of course so the link juice can retain.

I believe you will lose your ranking unless you keep those html pages in place.

The SEs index on content and location. If you have removed content or moved it to a new location, that text will start over with a value of zero (so to speak) and the previously indexed static pages will be removed from the SE index.

Better to put those static pages back online and change any links on the static pages to locations within the blog

You need to take the index.php from the wordpress directory and put that in the root. Then you modify that index.php file like this:
Change:
to:

Then in the wordpress admin you've got to go to Options and change the "Blog address" to www.YOURDOMAIN.com.

Lifer, the 301 redirect will pass linkjuice so you don't lose ranking. It's setting up the .htaccess redirect that can be a pain in the ass.

So do I actually still need a 301 redirect from index.html (existing) to index.php (new)?

I would just to be safe. You never know how many links are out there pointing to the index.html instead of just the root.

Thanks for the help, much appreciated.