Changing blog, keeping users and what about G?

[followgreg]

Hi,

We have a blog on a website and we are planning on replacing it with a new one.
Reason bahind this is that we would like to move to a more user friendly format and a new blog script.

Now how should we do to keep the 200-ish subscribers and how not to upset Google (which seems not so easy these days)?

At first I was thinking of 301 on all pages including the feed but this will not benefit users at all and will be time consuming.

The old blog was installed on /blog/ and the new blog will be on /new_blog/

How can I make Google recognize the new blog as....the new blog...and keep subscribers at the same time?

[tedster]

How about keeping the old blog exactly as it is - same urls, same directory - and include a link to the old content on the new blog that says "archive".

[followgreg]

Hi Tedster,

Good point as always!

In fact I gave the paths above as an example.

The reality is that the previous webmaster had installed the blog in /all-my-keywords-here/ and I personally would like to make it as simple as /blog/.

That's one of the reasons why we would love to change the directory in which the blog is installed.

I can send an email to all users to let them know. But I really have no clue how Google will take it and I promise I prefer my boss not to fire me over loosing all traffic when setting up the new blog! :)

[tedster]

Well, whenever you change urls, as you probably know, there's commonly a dip in traffic and rankings. Sometimes that traffic never fully recovers, sometimes it does.

301 on all pages including the feed but this will not benefit users at all and will be time consuming.

I would think you could 301 with a simple rule or two, no? And as for user benefits, it's good for anyone who bookmarked a page, or for anyone clicking on inbound links that use the old url.

In contrast, changing the feed's address is a very dicey action in terms of losing subscribers. I would avoid that if possible,

[followgreg]

If I had to choose I would keep subscribers.

Since the blog represents 50% of the page total for the site I am also concerned about the impact overall with Google although Google seems to prefer non sense content with fake comments and the like lately in my industry.

By the way I just noticed that:

on Google blogsearch when I search for blogurl:the_blog_url
it returns 0 results.

But when I search for blogurl:domain_without_www_and_tld blogurl:the_blog_url then it returns "some" pages.

I am not aware of what it could mean, never heard of this anywhere so far. Especially considering that this particular blog is almost 2 years old and has some strong backlinks, all relevant, no spam at all. Blog URL's show fine for a site: search in the main index, weird.
The blog was proxy hijacked 6 months ago, maybe a left over...I love Google but come on fix your s...t guys :)

Oh well, that could be another excuse for me to setup the new blog the way I want it.