Please Help: A question for SEO experts

I have a website, which has over 5000 links indexed by google and over 700 by big and other search engines already.

the issue is, i intend to delete the current WordPress installation and install a new one for issues best known to me (The issue is complicated really).

The question is, will google penalize me if i do that? i mean, all urls on search engines will show 404 error since they are no longer existing. also, i have some ranked keywords already.

right now, i'm just confused as to what to do. please advise me.

I use the rank math plugin and as such, my urls gets indexed within an hour of posting also, will bots still crawl my website at that rate even if i delete my current installation?

PS: the website is only 4months old and receives 792 search visits from google every month and 2,000 visits everyday.

You should note the old URLs and the new URLs of your popular pages. Then use 301 redirect for all these pages. 301 redirect or "Moved Permanently is recommended for SEO. You can make these changes in the htaccess file. Search Google for more details.

sikandar said:

You should note the old URLs and the new URLs of your popular pages. Then use 301 redirect for all these pages. 301 redirect or "Moved Permanently is recommended for SEO. You can make these changes in the htaccess file. Search Google for more details.

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ok thanks.

"The question is, will google penalize me if i do that? " nope they will not ban you , if you're using wordpress use this plugin :
https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/Banning from google is not that easy , keep doing what you are doing and keep getting "good backlinks"

speedy5044 said:

"The question is, will google penalize me if i do that? " nope they will not ban you , if you're using wordpress use this plugin :
https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/Banning from google is not that easy , keep doing what you are doing and keep getting "good backlinks"

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Thank you alot for this reply

If you are going to end up 404'ing every page that's ranking, yes you will fuck your rankings. Will you get them back? Depends how much you know about SEO. If you know how to action this without changing the variables, yes. But if you change any variables with your site structure/content, it's going to affect your rankings.

It's just an algorithm at the end of the day, when you change your site, you will change the outcome of the algorithm. Will it be good or bad? Depends on what you do.

They won't ban you, it's not as if they manually rank your site. But you might lose rankings depending on what's changed with your site.

Dark Sky said:

If you are going to end up 404'ing every page that's ranking, yes you will fuck your rankings. Will you get them back? Depends how much you know about SEO. If you know how to action this without changing the variables, yes. But if you change any variables with your site structure/content, it's going to affect your rankings.

It's just an algorithm at the end of the day, when you change your site, you will change the outcome of the algorithm. Will it be good or bad? Depends on what you do.

They won't ban you, it's not as if they manually rank your site. But you might lose rankings depending on what's changed with your site.

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Thank you for your insights.

Why don't you back up the contents, install a new wordpress and then do a restore. That way you won't have any 404s and you'll still have a new wordpress running.