Redirecting old blog home page to new blog home page in new location.

Wordpress changes

[Lorel]

This involves another problem I had in this thread: 4970482

I redesigned a site that used to have everything in a WP blog (static pages and blog posts were in the root or redirected to the root). I took the static pages out of the blog and set up a separate WP blog for the posts and am currently 301ing the old blog posts to the new blog.

I had a discussion going in the Wordpress forum a few months back re how to download the database when the previous owner wouldn't give us access to the server - I managed to get the images but not the posts off the old server. However, I got some of the posts off Google, archive org, etc., and we are rewriting the others. I'm reposting the articles and trying to redirect the old URLs to the new ones.

To clarify the old website was set up in Wordpress including all static pages with the home page URL like this:
https://example.com/

blog pages were like this:
https://example.com/name-of-blog-article/

the blog took up so much download time (due to code bloat) that I separated the static pages from the blog so now the website and blog home page and other pages look like this:

https://example.com/
https://example.com/about/
https://example.com/otherpages/
https://example.com/blog/
https://example.com/blog/name-of-blog-article/

I'm able to redirect the old blog articles to the new location, however, how do I tell search engines that the old blog home page is in a new place without messing up the new home page, or is this even possible?

[not2easy]

Does this mean that in the old setup, the entire site was in a WP install in the root directory found at "https://example.com/" and now it is at "https://example.com/blog/"? I'm pretty sure you don't want to redirect requests for the old URL to the new one or no one can visit your new home page.

Since you have removed many of the pages, it is not really exactly the same as it was. If you want, you can make your blog's home page show up at "https://example.com/" again, even though it is in a different directory. It is not very complicated to do and WP offers instructions on each step of that process. It is not clear that is what you want to do though, and it may not solve the question.

If you are asking whether to fill out the "Change of Address" form in GSC, it can help, but even if you don't tell them that way, Google will find the old content on your site, a sitemap for the blog should help there.

[Lorel]

@not2easy

Yes, the original setup was in WP in the root directory at https://example.com.
However, I took all static pages out of WP and only re-installed the new blog posts within WP.

In the original website I didn't have access to the cpanel, file manager, htaccess or FTP as the previous designer was a scam artist. So I couldn't either backup the database or export it or see the redirects.

The home page of the blog is only a brief intro to what's in the blog so I guess I'll just leave it as is.

Thank for your input.