Moving WordPress Blog to Static Pages – SEO Implications?

If you will have the same URLs, then there is no issue at all. Google doesn’t care if the pages were created by WordPress or by any other CMS, or by hand for that matter. If the content comes up on the same URL, then Google will continue to give you whatever credit they currently give you for those pages.

If you are moving to new URLs, you simply need to create a 301 redirect from the old URLs and Google will pass the “juice” along to your new URLs. A 301 redirect tells Google that you have permanently moved the page to a new location and updates their records accordingly. It will take a couple of weeks for Google to fully make the transfer to the new URLs however, so if you have rankings, they might disappear for that time, but will be right back in after 2-3 weeks.

Thanks webber286, that’s good to know. Makes me feel more comfortable with the transition.

One other thing I wanted to ask about was whether google, yahoo etc sees these two page urls as the same:

xxx.mysite.blog/
xxx.mysite.blog/index.html

The way my web design package works, both point to the same page, but does this matter in terms of SEO?

Is there an easy way so that of the (many) pages that come up as index.html can get re-directed to the simple / url instead? – That is, one sweeping 301 that can do this for all the pages at once?

Cheers

Hopefully, I answered my own question, here

I created an htaccess file with the following in it:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
#
# redirect index.htm and index.html to / (do this before non-www to www)
#
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /.*index.html? HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html?$ http://www.penny-slot-machines.com/$1 [R=301,L]

and it seems to work

Is that the right way to go about it?

You should use Google’s webmaster tools to be for certain. You can tell them what your index page is named so that it get’s counted either way.