Bobby - 1:05 pm on Jun 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

jdMorgan, thanks for your thoughtful response.

While it's true that search enigne robots don't execute JavaScript the old pages can remain on the server and pull in potential clients. The redirect in Javascript assures that they get to the "new" site rather than looking at the old pages left on the server.

Page Rank and Link Popularity have little importance in my view, what's important is that people who are searching for a particular service using a specific search string find the site. The old pages are placed well for those strings and the new ones are an unknown quantity.

Thanks for the tip about doing a 301 to a site map, that might be a good idea.

What I'm really trying to weigh up here is whether or not by doing a 301 to a "similar" page as the old one (though without the same content and tags) I would achieve top search engine rankings for the new page. If not then I think it's in my interest to leave the old page up on the server with a client side redirect.