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    4. Way to spider Wordpress site

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    Way to spider Wordpress site

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    • DanCrean
      DanCrean last edited by

      I have an old Wordpress site and I want to move it to a new server and take it off Wordpress (too many hacks).  I am trying to spider the site so as to get static, non-Wordpress, pages.

      I am having trouble doing this.  When I spider the site, it changes the URLs.  For instance, if the URL is www.domain.com/page/  the URL I get out of the spider is /page/index.html  And those are not the URLs in the search engine indices.  There are about 2000 pages on this site, so it is not feasible to set up 301 redirects.

      I tried using these spidering programs: WinHTTack Website Copier and PageNest

      Does anyone know of another method of turning a Wordpress site into a non Wordpress site?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • evolvingSEO
        evolvingSEO last edited by

        Hi Dan

        Hmm that's a little strange. Two things;

        • is WordPress updated? Do you get the normal URLs when viewing in your browser?
        • have you tried Screaming Frog SEO Spider? It's free to crawl up to 500 pages 😉 Although it won't get the actual HTML on the pages, it could solve the URL issue perhaps.

        This blackhat world thread has a few options too.

        -Dan

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • mememax
          mememax last edited by

          Hi Dan, I'm not so experienced in migrating a WP to non -wp but I understand that the issue you're having is that the spider is returning index.htmlfiles for urls like domain/page/.

          IT's normal, any spider you will use you'll always have and index.html file. Every directory has it's index.html which is the default file to show if you're not establishing something different with rewrite rules.

          If you write /page/ the browser will read the index.html file. What you have to be sure is that you'll set up a 301 redirect to avoid any index.html url to show and have it redirected to the main / page (with wildcards is a one line rule) and that your internal links are pointing all to / pages and not to index.html version of it. You can jsut find and replace the /index.html" string into the html code with the /" text (dreamweaver or any html editor will do that in bulk.

          Only one commentary on you idea is that you may consider useful to build a php driven site, using includes for header, footer and nav/sidebar, jsut because thinking ahead if you're willing to make changes to a portion of the page repeating throughout the site you'll have to make changes in all pages and uplaod them all which is quite huge to do and also let space for many human/machine errors.

          Hope that helped you out!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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