Migrating Content from Static Pages to WordPress (blog)
I’m grumpy today, after spending many hours on a very mundane task, and I recognize that I’ll need to spend several dozen more hours to complete it. I made the decision recently to migrate most of the static “articles” from my namesake web site (MarkWelch.com) to my blog site (MarkWelchBlog.com).
The biggest task this week was migrating my “free affiliate-program advice for merchants” from static pages over to the blog; if you’ve bookmarked or posted links to any of the old pages, they should redirect to the same exact article on the blog site.
Yes, I know my content will lose PageRank (and will likely impact Google’s perception of the “age” of the content, even though I’ve tagged each blog entry/article with the date it was originally written). And it is definitely a PITA to manually cut and paste content and then set up a redirect (for every static page) so they point to the correct blog entry.
But once I’m done, I’ll finally be able to make site-wide changes that actually affect my entire web site (without needing to manually edit a bunch of files that are five, ten, or even fifteen years old, dating back through and beyond several earlier content-management strategies I used). And I’m also inviting comments on the old articles (for example, I hope some folks might inform me of the new location of the many links within these articles which come up ‘404 not found’ or worse).
Every time I do a “site-wide update,” I’m surprised to see how many hundreds of articles I’ve posted on my site over the years. Many of the older articles are deleted with redirects to my home page (most of these are articles about companies that are long defunct). (I’m actually considering “restoring” a few of those older articles, from backup CDs.)
I’m also surprised to see that my earlier migration of my “perspectives” content (the “opinion & commentary” essays which I first moved over to the blog) wasn’t quite complete, as I hadn’t replaced some of the static pages with redirects to the corresponding blog pages (I assume Google’s algorithms probably pounded those pages with “duplicate content” penalties).
Lots and lots of work, most of it very mundane, but it’s also a trip down memory lane. And ultimately, this work should make my life much simpler in future years, if I ever seek to profit from this content. It’s ironic that after 15 years mostly making a living from internet advertising, affiliate programs, and Google PPC Search, there are currently no ads anywhere on my site!
The migration is definitely not complete yet, and I’m still debating how to deal with some content which doesn’t seem appropriate for the blog site.
I decided to restore a dozen “ancient” articles that I’d written in 1997 (or so). You can view them in the separate category “Web Advertising in 1997.”