Comments:

1. Josh Lipovetsky says:

   February 10, 2010 at 1:41 pm

   Paul, thanks for taking the time to make this video. Personally, I don’t have a need to combine any wordpress blogs, but who knows what the future holds? I haven’t really seen any videos like this on the internet, and thanks for going into detail about Permalinks! I hope you get a lot of traffic from this video!

   Thanks,
   Josh Lipovetsky.
   .-= Josh Lipovetsky´s last blog ..Tomorrow is Today – Uplifting Miracles =-.

   Reply
2. Bart says:

   February 10, 2010 at 10:32 pm

   Great job on the video Paul this will help in merging my blogs into one also.

   Reply
3. Taryn says:

   February 11, 2010 at 6:12 am

   Paul, thank you so much for this. It was incredibly helpful.

   When you use the WordPress export function, do you know if you have the option to export only your posts? I don’t necessarily need to import any of my pages into my new site.

   And, once you’ve completed the process and done your redirects, I’m assuming that you then need to keep your old sites for perpetuity (or at least for as long as you want to be a blogger!)?

   Reply
   • Paul Piotrowski says:

     February 11, 2010 at 12:19 pm

     @Taryn: When you export, it will export both Pages and Posts. However, I just thought of a little trick you can use. It might work. Go into WordPress and create a new user, called “BOB” for example. Go into each of the pages you DO NOT want to export and set the author for those pages as BOB. Leave all your posts as your own name. Then, during export when WordPress asks if you want to export ALL authors, just select yourself. That should export all your posts without any of the pages you assigned to BOB.

     As for the redirects, you’ll want to keep your old domains for as long as it takes you to update all your links. If you do the “Site Address Change” I talk about in the video with Google, the Google index should update itself in a few days or weeks. You can do a search through your most common traffic sources and see where the traffic is coming from.

     For example, if your highest traffic from Google Organic search comes from “abc keyword1″, then go to Google and search for “abc keyword1″. See if your old domain or your new domain show up for the search. If it’s still your old domain, then Google hasn’t updated the index yet. For a while, you may actually see BOTH domains showing up in the index.

     You can ditch the old domains when you no longer get traffic through them because you’ve updated all your links everywhere. Since a domain is cheap, investing $30/domain to keep them around for 3-5 years just in case there are old links out there is not a bad investment IMO.

     But if you have a domain expiring and it doesn’t get a lot of traffic anyways, then just ditch it. I would say that 180 days max is enough time for Google to update everything.

     Reply
4. Taryn says:

   February 12, 2010 at 2:21 am

   Thanks for the detailed answer, Paul – you’re a star!
   .-= Taryn´s last blog ..How To Backup Your WordPress Site =-.

   Reply
5. Elaine Johnston says:

   February 17, 2010 at 8:17 am

   Paul…you are wonderful!

   I’ve been thinking of combining two Word Press sites into one, and been wondering how to do it. Well, now I know thanks to you…thanks so much for taking the time to teach.

   I won’t have time to try it today, but will let you know how I make out when I do have the time. Am I allowed to give the web addresses of my sites? Still trying to learn all the rules and regulations for comments, forums, facebook, twitter, and whatever else is out there in the internet world.

   Yes, you can teach an “old lady” new tricks! Have a great day…..
   elaine

   Reply
6. Paul Piotrowski says:

   February 17, 2010 at 11:28 am

   @Elaine: Your name is linked to your Blog when you leave comments on Blogs so if people want to visit your site they just click on your picture or name beside the comment and they are linked to your site.

   Also, I’m experimenting with the CommentLuv plugin which automatically links to your latest Blog post at the bottom of your comments. Kind of a reward for posting a comment. A way to get more “deep links” to your site.

   Reply
7. Coz says:

   February 17, 2010 at 5:46 pm

   great job with the video Paul. I have a couple of WordPress blogs and have been wondering about this

   Reply
8. Matt says:

   October 5, 2010 at 6:04 pm

   Hi, Thanks for the post I really appreciate it and it was very good. My question is:

   What if your blogs aren’t at the root of your url, i.e., instead of polymath.com/2010/01/01/blog-post you would have polymath.com/alternative/blog/2010/01/01/blog-post .

   What would your .htaccess file look like then for different permalinks and same permalinks?

   Thank you so much for the help,
   Matt

   Reply
   • Paul Piotrowski says:

     October 5, 2010 at 9:36 pm

     I think you’d have to mimic the same dir structure on the new blog…

     ie.
     blog1.com/alternative/blog/2010/01/01/blog-post

     would have to point to

     blog2.com/alternative/blog/2010/01/01/blog-post

     I’m not 100% sure though, you’d have to test.

     Reply
9. Larry says:

   November 13, 2010 at 11:13 pm

   Paul, this is really useful, so thank you much. I’ve gotten myself into quite a little wordpress bind. I have a commercial site (www.essentialmomentsphotos.com), and then a blog attached to that domain name (www.essentialmomentsphotos.com/blog). The idea was that this would be personal work for clients to see. Several years later, I started a wordpress blog under a different domain of professional work (www.larrybrunt.com). It really bothers me that my person work is linked to my commercial site and my professional work is under my personal name domain.

   So I want to switch, but keep the permalinks. Unfortunately, the permalinks in both are simply numeric, so there are probably redundancies. Is there any hope for me?
   .-= Larry ´s last blog ..A Fieldtrip to Turnbull =-.

   Reply
   • Paul Piotrowski says:

     November 14, 2010 at 12:47 am

     Woo, that’s a tough one because as you say the numeric permalinks will overlap and there is no way to control them. Also, in the end you want to get away from numeric permalinks anyways as they are bad for SEO.

     What you could do is run through your Google Analytics account and just see if there are any “main” pages that get good SEO and try to forward just those pages. The rest just try to re-rank them. If you don’t have any pages that aren’t getting at least 1,000 visitors/month, then it’s probably not worth your time messing with them. Just put the content on the new site, and then work on optimizing your SEO. You might have a dip in traffic short term, but long term it will be better I think.

     Reply
10. Anne @ lifestyler treadmill says:

    March 20, 2011 at 5:52 am

    Hello Paul! Your inputs are impressive! As a neophyte blogger, it’s great to know that I can combine 3 WordPress sites into 1. I’ll study your video so I can also do it… Thanks for the info.
    
    

    ---

    Anne @ lifestyler treadmill´s last post was… Lifestyler Treadmill

    Reply
11. Jenn says:

    March 25, 2011 at 1:44 pm

    Ack… I found your super helpful video and did step 1, 2, and 3… but wordpress is having a major problem with importing xml files. Tips??

    Reply
    • Paul Piotrowski says:

      March 25, 2011 at 11:59 pm

      What kind of problem? For me it just worked.

      Reply

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