PRIV P31f Change URL

Steps before an URL change

1) Decide about permalink structure

With Google indexing, the URL becomes the identifier of our content in the Google index. In general the decision about the URL, should be taken upfront. Therefore the very first step is to decide about Permalink structure.

The following pages contain more information about permalinks and stop words.

1a) Verify the permalink structure.

for all blogs except

Macro that has additionally the month:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%

under Permalinks:

Done on ACCEHMSySM

1b) Test the Stop Words plugin

PromoteAuthor has developed a plugin that removes all stop words from the URL for new posts or an existing site. We use this plugin before we give the URLs to Google with a site map.

More on the test procedure for stop words here.

DONE on Austrian

2) Hidden Back-end

We use All in One Security for hiding our back-end.  The hidden back-end is important part of our security strategy and it strongly reduces the chances to hack our site.

Done on ACCEHMSySM

3) Disable Comments

We must decide if we allow or disallow comments on the site.

Economic Blogs: The comments shall be written on the original site. So we disable comments for all economicblogs on the settings–> discussion page.

Done on ACCEHMSySM

4) Enable Google Indexing

We need to encourage Google to index your site. This can be done via Settings -> Reading.

The needed option is called “Search Engine Visibillity”. It must be turned off.

If checked, the WordPress discourages robots to index your entire site. But your site is not your entire webhost..
Basically, it will tell the bots not to index your WordPress application.

Most engines will still index it. A site might appear in google with the following text below it:

DONE on Austrian

Steps at Go-Live Day

5) Install the stop words plugin all sites

We need to install the lastest stop words plugin on all blog sites. It should contain the newest stop words from Austrian.

5b) Run stop words plugin:

restore old URLs

remove stop words for all blogs

6) Generate Sitemap

We must generate a new sitemap with all the content.

We use the SEO plugin By Yoast to that job.

DONE on Austrian

7) Disable Password Protection

The password protection guarantees that Google does not punish our site, when we still have issues with permalinks or content.

We use a plugin called “Password Protected”. Now we Deactivate it and delete.

Done on Austrian

8) Ping SiteMap

When we once add our site into WMT, we should “tell” Google to check our content. This is done via the Sitemap which we generate in Step 3). Once we give the sitemap to Google, the crawler bot automatically will start indexing the site. We will not need to wait Google to see our site.

 Done on Austrian

Step soon after go-live

9) Google WebMaster Tools

We must add our site into GWMT, so we can monitor our site. It is important to know what happen with the site every moment and the only tool from where we can get this information is Google’s WebMaster Tools.

Done on ACCEHMSySM

Steps that could be done later

10) Google Analytics

Adding the site into Google analytic, so we can track the visitors.

Done on ACCEHMSySM

11)Remarks

WordPress builds permalinks automatically:

• URLstart:= URL structure taken from WordPress general settings (like %category%/%year%)
• URL:= URLstart + “/” + postname

We prefer not to use %author% in the permalink structure, but add the author’s last name in the postname

The field parent_post is used for versioning and the hierarchy on pages.

12) Install Anti-spam plugin cleantalk

Ecoblogs: We disallow comments, so we might discuss if we need it.

Done on ACCEHMSySM

13) Use KeyCDN for all blogs

George will create an account for it.

14) JetPack stats

Install Jetpack. Disable all other modules except the stats.

Done on ACCEHMSySM

15) BackupBuddy

Control that BackupBuddy is running. Do a test restore of one backup  file

Done on ACCEHMSySM