Need help? Check out our Support site, then


WordPress.com Forums » Support

TRULY Convert Post to Page?

  1. kazvorpal
    Member

    I have some posts that have turned out so useful that I want them as a permanent fixture on the site...their own Page, not a post.

    The usual answer seems to be "copy the old info and paste it into a new Page". But this has some liabilities.

    For example:

    When you change the name of a post or page, people following links to the old URL are automatically redirected to the new one.

    But if you copy and paste the post into a new page, the old post either stays, people following old links sent to the outdated version, or you delete it, breaking existing links, or you put some lame text telling them it's been moved, and make them follow a link to the new page.

    Likewise, I'm concerned that having the old post/new page dilemma will confuse spiders, causing google and friends to degrade the ranking of the new page, as it's duplicate data. If it were a "moved page" auto-redirect like when you change a page or post's name, that would not be a factor.

    This also makes the listing in the RSS feed confusing, if the post is recent enough to be included there.

    The blog I need help with is butnowyouknow.wordpress.com.

  2. thesacredpath
    Member

    Why not delete the content of the post, and put a link and a little descriptive text into the post telling your visitors what you have done? They can then click on the link to get to the page were the updated information is.

  3. kazvorpal
    Member

    Forwarding links like that lose a huge percentage of readers, typically.

    People often can't be bothered to follow yet another link, unless they were really fixated on getting the data in question. In some cases, click-through can be under one percent.

    If you've ever cross-posted or reposted something from another blog, with nothing but a quick summary, compare your clicks-through to the original, to your actual page views of your summary, and you'll see what I mean.

    So I want it to redirect with a 301 http code, ideally. I am figuring that's what happens when you rename a post.

  4. thesacredpath
    Member

    We cannot do 301 redirects here. What I suggest is the only option I'm aware of.

    And as far as using a post to redirect, I have not found what you say to be true for the most part. When I moved to a self-hosted blog, I deleted all my posts here, put a link to my new blog in a last post on the blog here, and got more than 90% click through from the very beginning.

    I have also move a number of other people over to self-hosted blogs using a redirect post and again, I've seen 90% or better click through. The number of hits on the new blog basically took right off from where the old one was.

  5. kazvorpal
    Member

    Well, I guess I'm stuck hoping that's true, at least until I get around to hosting the blog on my own web server, here.

    It just seems like the ability to move/redirect is a very basic feature.

  6. thesacredpath
    Member

    A favorite tool of sploggers is redirects. They build blogs all over the place with all sorts of different names and seemingly different subjects, and then use redirects to sent people to other sites or other completely unrelated posts or pages. I've clicked on quite a number of links in search results and ended up on an entirely different site from the one I thought I was going to.

    The likelihood of 301 redirects hitting here anytime soon is virtually nill.

  7. kazvorpal
    Member

    So what kind of redirect is used when you rename a page?

    When I even simply move a page in the heirarchy, say from wordpress.com/politics/page_that_i_made/ to wordpress.com/environment/page_that_i_made/ because I changed parent pages, the old URL gets redirected to the new URL.

    That must happen, somehow.

    Whatever way that is, it could be done for moving a post to a page.

    What's more, I suspect that you're mistaken about those being 301...301 is a permanent redirect, so it would not cause the bogus search engine results you're talking about. The spider would simply ignore the old page, indexing only the page to which it was redirected.

    I would suppose that those would be 302 redirects, instead, which are ostensibly temporary, so the spider would still index the original page.

  8. justjennifer
    Member

    Why lose your Google juice by moving the Post off to a Page and giving it an entirely new address? What I did was create a Page with a relative link as its title, as described here http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/page-tabs-as-external-links/

    While the technique described there mentions external links, it works just as well for internal links. You can see this technique in action on my photoblog http://gammagirl.wordpress.com/ Look in the Page Widget on the right, The FAQ links to my most popular post.

  9. justjennifer
    Member

    I still cannot think what advantage there would be in truly converting a Post to a Page. In fact, all I can think of are disadvantages including loss of search engine traffic, no ability to categorize.

    Another option to my above suggestion, why not use the Top Posts Widget in your sidebar? If those posts have the traffic you say, they will appear there. Or you can create your own "Top Posts" or "Suggested Posts" by creating a link list in a Text Widget to highlight those posts.

  10. kazvorpal
    Member

    This doesn't help, at all.

    You're saying that I can make the title of the old post a link to the new post...but, if anything, there's a lower chance of users clicking on the title than of them clicking on a link I put inside the old post with the admonition that "this post has been moved to a permanent page, click here to see it".

    We'll see whether I can actually redirect many people, anyway.

  11. justjennifer
    Member

    No, what I meant is leave the Post where it is and create a special link to it to make it appear as though it is a Page. That's exactly what I did with the link to "The FAQ" in my photoblog's Pages Widget. If you hover your cursor over the link in the widget, you'll see that it takes you to a Post.

  12. kazvorpal
    Member

    No no no...my issue isn't that I want it to appear in the Pages tab.

    It's that I want to remove it from the feed and make at an actual, static page with. I want people following the link to the dated feed post to be redirected to a page with the same content.

    I am not simply worried about whether it appears as a link like other pages.

  13. justjennifer
    Member

    Got it! Good luck!

Topic Closed

This topic has been closed to new replies.

About this Topic

Tags