I'm going to convert a client's static site, all hand coded HTML pages to Wordpress. They have a bunch of static pages that I'm going to keep as 'pages' in Wordpress. There will be some static content that I'm going to convert into blog entries (and back date them).
How do I transfer their search engine rankings to the new Wordpress site? Some will be a static page converted to a Wordpress 'page' and some will be a static page converted to a blog entry?
In your destination server, you can customize the .htaccess file to redirect old pages URL to new ones. The old URL will still work and the page rank will be kept.
Use 301 redirects in your .htaccess in root. All search bots recognize 301 redirects as permanent redirects and don't drop the pages from indexes, but reassign the URL. Put them above the Wordpress rewrite block in .htaccess.
The format is:
Redirect 301 /myoldurl.html http://mydomain.com/newpagename
Notice that the domain is not included in the first URL, only the page name with suffix, assuming it's in root.
Or use WordPress › Redirection « WordPress Plugins to manage redirects inside the WP admin area and log them, too.