Bringing another website to Wealthy Affiliate
Bringing another website to Wealthy Affiliate
I would like to bring my Compumarine website to Wealthy Affiliate but I have a concern about my search engine ranking. If you use my key phrase "cedar strip boat plans" to search on Google, yahoo or Bing you will find my site listed close to the top position on the first page. It varies from day to day but most of the time it is in the #1 position. I am currently using obsolete MS FrontPage software to maintain the site and I would love to be able to transfer it to a WordPress site especially for the hosting advantages at Wealthy Affiliate, but my concern is about ranking.
Working on a compumarine siterubix website
I have started working on a compumarine siterubix website but I haven't published the site yet because I don't want to have duplicate content on the internet before I am ready to make it live. My Compumarine website has been on the web since 1995 and has a large amount of content in it. I have worked very hard on it over the years to get the ranking where it is now. It has many reciprocal links which I understand is not all that helpful now as it used to be. It will take a lot of time and a lot of work to get the equivalent content to a WordPress site on WA. My concern is; will the change will affect my ranking on the search engines negatively? I would like to hear about any similar experiences WA members may have had, positive or negative.
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There is some coverage of this subject here on WA: https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/website-development-programming/moving-hosting-to-wealthy-affiliates
Looks like the training is for wordpress sites.
Please let us know what you discover about moving a non-wordpress site.
But the link above, the info says you should not really loose ranking -- you build the new site but don't make it live until you are ready, then discontinue the old site, activate the new site and it will be reindexed in good time. The fact you have such an old domain is a great advantage!
Thanks Mike...I moved two other sites to WA previously and the training was very helpful. I just worry about this one because it ranks so high now in all the search engines. I would hate to do something wrong and hurt my ranking. This Compumarine web site brings me substantial business so I don't want to jeopardize that. I have sold in excess of 4,000 sets of plans on the site.
Please keep us posted about what you learn..I also have external (to WA) websites but not sure I would want to reengineer them to work on Wordpress (and my host is unlimited sites for less than $5 a month, been with them over 10 years) -- lots of things going on with them. I have not gotten so far as to learn the exact restrictions of these sites here at WA (if you can ftp and publish just regular html), I figure eventually I'll run into the specs and restrictions. For now I am paid years in advance and no great rush to move them -- in fact I could do my wordpress sites there (on the external host) if I wanted to -- they would work the same, we have wordpress capability and the sql databases and all that.
I will let you know what I find out per your request. The main reason I would like to move my Compumarine website is that I am using MS FrontPage software to maintain it. FrontPage is obsolete now and not supported by Microsoft any longer. It will not work with Windows 7 so I have to use the XP mode in Windows 7 which is a real pain in the you know what. Plus the hosting for that website is costing me as much as all my websites put together here at WA. There are a lot of good reasons to make the change but I want some assurance that the change would not negatively affect my rankings on the search engines.
In the main chat window -- you will often find @Rich and he seems to have just volumes of knowledge and "links" he is willing to share. Otherwise post a blog and it will be broadcast to the main dashboard and with a good title many folks will look and those that have more experience likely would be able to answer. This is something I need to know at some point myself. Web hosting should not cost $47 a month (more like $5 a month) -- so even if you could not move it to here (to save money while you think about how to re work the old site to new site software) you should be able to transfer to another provider -- basically a matter of copying the files and moving to the other ISP. Making sure it works at new ISP, then change the website pointing from the old to the new. It would be transparent to the users and to google. Google will not punish you if your site is just temporarily down during the transition period -- but it should transition fairly fast -- within hours actually.
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I would keep your Compumarine website where it is. Build a WordPress site like you are doing. Use the blog to engage your customers and link back to your Compumarine site to provide more detail. Provide content detail on whichever site is appropriate and on the other site post an abstract of the article with a "read more" link to the original article. By the way, I love wooden boats and even made a 16 foot kayak for use on Kaneohe Bay.
Google gives lots of credit to the age of a website. I think that credit stays with the URL when you move it, but I would not risk it. As the saying goes, "If it ainʻt broke donʻt fix it." Test everything and only work with what preforms better.