migrating blog site to wordpress

[ketanco]

Hello,
I am thinking about migrating my website, which is a blog website to wordpress. Right now the content is displayed through a structure that I had written in house. The articles date back to 2008.

When I migrate to wordpress, I will basically copy paste each article. Tough but sure way.

When I publish the article in wordpress, I will of course assign each article its original date, not todays date.

1-SHould I keep my current site online, publish everything into wordpress at a separate folder not visible to public, and then once it is done, bring everything back?

2-What I am trying to avoid is, to cause google think that everything on my new site is new... Right now google knows that my site content is old dated and growing by time, which is a good thing right? How can I keep it that way?

Please make your suggestion so that migrating to wordpress will not cause google think that my site has duplicate content or cause google to forget my sites content was actually older... What precautions should I take?

[iahne]

I suggest you keep your old pages with their respective urls. Then the new pages should have their new url. Then use htaccess once your done with your new one so that when someone tries to access your old blog they will be redirected to the new one but same content. Your old site/pages/urls are popular by now in search engines and you cannot set aside the fact that you need their popularity to introduce your new site. That's how the htaccess is mostly being used.

[ketanco]

I will keep the same domain name. you are telling me to keep each news entry urls (old ones) as it is right? this is a good point. i think i need to have wordpress modification for this

[iahne]

Yes that's right.