Sevenhelmets

Awesome, thanks for the input folks. Someone else suggested:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/link-juice-keeper/

which was pretty much what I was looking for. I’d also be interested in finding out more about the regex redirect in Redirection, because that sounds more powerful, and potentially a better idea all around. Any “help guides” on that John?

Thanks for the response Rev. Voodoo!

Unfortunately I can’t quite follow the last part of your instructions. Are you referring to editing the page in the page editor section (Appearance —> Editor)?

I followed your instructions so far – copied index.php, renamed it blog.php, inserted the

<?php
/*
Template Name: Blog
*/
?>

At the very top of the file, and then inserted

<?php
if (is_page('blog')) {
  $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
  query_posts("category_name=blog&paged=$paged");
} ?>

Just before the “if have posts” part of the code.

But after that I’m lost – is the blog.php suppose to be the new index page? Any help would be much much much appreciated, unfortunately I don’t have a single shred of programming experience, so I’m just picking up as I go…