3 Wordpress sites 1 Tumblr site coming under 1domain(4subdomains) WPMU: Proper Redirect?

[vmialik]

Hey Guys,

witnessSF.org (WP), witnessLA.org(Tumblr), witnessTO.com(WP), witnessHK.com(WP), and witnessSEOUL.com(new site no redirects needed) are being moved over to sf.ourwitness.com, la.ourwitness.com and so forth. All under on large Wordpress MU instance.

Some have hundreds of articles/links others a bit less.  What is the best method to take, I understand there are easy redirects, and the complete fully manual one link at a time approach. Even the WP to WP the permalinks are changing from domain.com/date/post-name to domain.com/post-name?

Here are some options:

1. Just redirect all previous witinessla.org/* to la.ourwitness.org/ (automatic direct all pages to home page deal) (easiest not the best)2) Download Google Analytics top redirected domains about 50 urls have significant ranking and traffic (in LA's sample) and just redirect those to custom links. (most bang for the buck for the articles that rank manually set up to the correct place) 3) Best of the both worlds may be possible? Automated perhaps?I prefer working with .htaccess vs a redirect plugin for speed issues. Please advise. Thanks guys!

[vmialik]

Hi Ahalliday

That is the plan. I was just hoping there would be a solid automated system or process by now. But I guess its back to the trusted manual approach. Thanks

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi,

I don't know how many pages you have, but I would consider doing each page manually take the time and do it correctly, in my experience automated systems never go completely right so you would probably end up spending a lot of time checking the redirects.

Why take the risk in hurting your rankings / traffic for saving a little bit of time. Do it the correct way the first time - plus you may also find a few urls that aren't adding any real value etc so these can be pointed to the home page.

[vmialik]

Thats a negative on "Since you are moving the websites to another domain and keeping the same structure, so the permalinks of each page will stay the same except the base domain name "

-permalink structure will change thats why its not so plug and play, and looking for some automated or semi automated methods, otherwise will have to do so manually...