Adding an existing subfolder site to a fresh multisite in the root, would it cause a problem?

Question

I have a 5 years old subfolder site example.com/us and I have nothing in the root site example.com. Now I want to setup a multisite in the root site to create a network, then I want to add the existing subfolder site example.com/us to the network, would it be a problem? Do I have to do some extra work for that to work? I've tried that in the localhost and it worked fine, but I want to be sure before moving to the Live setup. I don't want to harm my site on Google, neither do I want to lose my link building. This website has thousands of visitors daily from Google, and I don't want to lose all that.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Nope, WP multisite will not affect your Google ranking as long as you maintain your previously indexed URL. You already mentioned in the comments that you'll be using a subfolder installation - that's great. Though I'd like to add even if you do a subdomain installation (or have a different domain altogether), you can retain your rank via 301 redirects (read this) and informing Google itself of the changes you've made via webmaster tools.

Also, since you're installing multisite I guess you'll be adding more example.com/sites or even use example.com itself for content - and that's fine. Just make sure you do not have duplicate content in your multisite, that will get Google to penalize your ranking.

Answer 2

I would suggest you to backup all you WP site in /us subfolder (Wordpress Export), than install your Multisite, and re-import your /us website. Everything will be much easier this way. If you try to install them side by side you're going to have a lot of conflict.

Answer 3

If you want to create a subfolder network something like below:

example.com/us/blog2 example.com/us/blog4

Then there's no problem and you can do it without worry. But if you want something like blog1.example.com/us/blog2 then it's impossible.