Wordpress - Blog not at root = Big Mistake

I made a big mistake. When I created the Farklerules.com website, I didn’t change the default wordpress location. So I ended up in a subdirectory. Now the question was, how to get the traffic from the home page to the blog?

Turns out that is easy enough, with a little php code.

<?php
define(’WP_USE_THEMES’, true);
require(’./blog/wp-blog-header.php’);
?>

But it means that the search engines are looking deeper in your site, and your home page is a redirect, and it’s going to cut into your SEO. I heard lots of different stories and in the end, the only thing they all seemed to agree on was to blog from the root. If I was going to take a hit from moving my site, let it happen early. So I went ahead and moved all my pages to the root, and added some custom 301 pages that would permanently redirect the old pages to the new site. I know the 301 is bad, but it should only be needed for the first week or so, for those few, early indexed pages.

This sounds easy enough, but the whole experience (including upgrading to Wordpress 2.6.1 while I was in there) took me several hours of research, and testing. And it didn’t go nice the first time.

I also add backlinks from BuncoRules.com to get some quality traffic, and it’s already paying (small) dividends.

I followed the 30DC advice, and social bookmarked the pages as described in their videos. Let’s see how that helps.