I recently decided to move my WordPress blog to HostGator from WordPress.com.  I made a number of changes including:

• changed my domain from johnlevandowski.com to wpselect.com
• set my site up as a multisite network
• changed the permalink settings to “post name” from the default “day and name” format used on WordPress.com
• disabled the author and date-based archives using the WordPress SEO plugin.

With all the above changes here are the rewrite rules I put in place using a .htaccess file so that visitors to my WordPress blog would not receive 404 page not found errors and that hopefully seo would not be negatively affected.

Here are the .htaccess rules I put in place:

1. RedirectMatch 301 ^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.*)$ http://example.com/blog/$4
2. RedirectMatch 301 ^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/(.*)$ http://example.com/blog/$3
3. RedirectMatch 301 ^/tag/(.*)$ http://example.com/blog/tag/$1
4. RedirectMatch 301 ^/category/(.*)$ http://example.com/blog/category/$1
5. RedirectMatch 301 ^/author/(.*)$ http://example.com/

The first rule redirects visitors from http://johnlevandowski.com/2011/09/12/wordpress-performance-opcode-cache/ to http://wpselect.com/blog/wordpress-performance-opcode-cache/

The second rule redirects visitors from http://johnlevandowski.com/2011/10/wordpress-author-information-in-google-using-relme-relauthor/ to http://wpselect.com/blog/wordpress-author-information-in-google-using-relme-relauthor/

The third and fourth rules redirect visitors to category and tag archives to the new archive pages.

The fifth rule redirects author archive page visitors to my site’s home page, since the author archive pages are disabled.

The first and second rule will also redirect visitors to data based archive pages (disabled) to a page with a slug of “blog”.  I created a blog page so that visitors to http://johnlevandowski.com/2010/01/ would get a redirect to http://wpselect.com/blog/ that lists all my WordPress blog posts.

If you have any further suggestions, please leave a comment below.