Use HTML site URL's Recreated exactly on Custom Wordpress Site? WordPress

John Cotton answers:

Tyler

I really think you should be using 301 redirects - Google isn't going to punish your SEO for that because that's what 301 redirects are for. It's almost certainly worse to have two pages with the same content (your new WordPress page and a view of that page via a rewrite)....

However, if you are dead set to do this, then this is how to do it:


1/ Add the following code to your header.php file, just before </head>:


<?php if ( is_singular() ) { ?>
<link rel="canonical" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" />
<?php } ?>


2/ Add the following code to your theme functions.php file


function my_add_rewrite_rules( $rules ) {
$newrules = array();

$newrules['^my-old-url-1$'] = 'index.php?p=212';
$newrules['^my-old-url-2$'] = 'index.php?p=315';
$newrules['^my-old-url-3$'] = 'index.php?p=72';
// etc for each of your 80 urls where p=id points to the page/post id of the replacement page

return $newrules + $rules;
}
add_action('rewrite_rules_array', 'my_add_rewrite_rules');


3/ Change your permalinks to whatever you want (/%category%/%postname% is good), but <strong>DON'T</strong> .html in there - it's extra bytes, unnecessary and doesn't add anything to your SEO. Save Permalinks (even if you don't change them).

Step 1 is important for telling Google (and others) which url is the REAL url - it should stop it penalising you for duplicate content.

Step 2 rewrites each of the urls (you've only got 80 and you only need to do it once). p=ID works regardless of how you set your permalinks and gives you the flexibility to change permalinks at a later point.

Step 3 executes the code in step 2.

JC