Buying a website which uses RapidWeaver

[amidoingthisright]

I’m currently in the process of purchasing a website which has been built using RapidWeaver, after a little research this seems be only support an Apple OS and I only use Windows.

Is there anyway if transferring it to another platform without loosing the content / SEO ranking. The SEO ranking being one of the main reasons for purchase.

[steveashdown]

I’ve never used rapidweaver but I believe it’s just a code generator with a visual interface. I don’t think it uses a database. You should be able to open the pages in any coding application to make changes. How easy it is to edit depends on how clean the code is that it produces.

Taking the content and putting it into something like Wordpress without loosing SEO ranking would take some skill but is doable. There are so many factors to consider, a lot more than just copy and paste of content.

[classicaholic]

Probably easier just to buy MacBook - its easy to edit using RapidWeaver.

[amidoingthisright]

Thanks both, the site I'm looking at buying is a directory site in the same sector as my business. I originally approached them with the intention of having my site listed on there but I was told by the owner that he was planning on closing it down due to the costs involved in maintaining it. Given the traffic it receives each month I thought buying it for a nominal sum would be a easy way to display a banner advert for my own site for little outlay. I wonder now if it would be simpler just to redirect the domain? Or would that affect the SEO?

Please bear with me, the world of SEO and Web development is a little alien to me.

[steveashdown]

If you turned the domain into a forward then you’d loose most of its SEO value within a month or two.

You’d get best value from it by keeping it as it is and putting a feature on your business on the home page.

Google (etc) don’t give away their processes so people try to reverse engineer them. This makes SEO calculated guess work. We do know though that they try to push genuine stuff to the top and penalise anything trying to cheat the system. So useful information like directory sites tend to do quite well but if you turned it into a big ad for yourself it would drop off fairly quickly.