Forum Moderators: phranque
I'm currently in the process of having my website completely redesigned and developed, so I was wondering if you could advise me on the best method to limit any loss of site momentum/dead urls.
The (current/old) site is an ecommerce store, with approximately 1,000 unique products/pages, and it is PHP/mySQL powered. It is also hosted on an Apache server.
My biggest concern is that the new site is .NET powered and (most likely) will be hosted on a Windows IIS 6.0 server, so I'm a bit stumped on the best approach to take with these redirects.
Does anyone have any recommendations?
Second-best approach for the short-term, and best for the long term, is to require that the new URLs be designed and architected so that you never have to change them again -- even if the site's underlying technology is moved from .net back to .php, or on to something even newer in the future.
One piece of this solution is to use extensionless URLs on any new site. In this way, the technology used to generate a page is not visible to the Web. And since the Web doesn't care how you generate a page on your server and extensionless URLs are shorter than those with extensions, there are several strong "positives" to the approach.
Also, take a look at this paper by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the hyperlink: Hypertext Style: Cool URIs don't change [w3.org].
Any external redirects or internal rewrites you elect to use will have to be implemented on the new server, unless you are changing domain names and intend to keep the old server up. Therefore, you'll need to look into ISAPI Rewrite -- The IIS equivalent of Apache mod_rewrite. While this should be included or available on any dedicated server, it is not free software; If it's not there, you may have to purchase it. Be sure that you will be allowed to install it on the new hosting account -- not likely if it's a shared name-based virtual server, for example.
If you do use external redirects and change the URLs, you can expect a bumpy ride. Depending on the PageRank/Link-popularity of your pages, you may suffer rankings losses for a few weeks, up to many months -- The depth and duration of this problem depend on far too many factors to predict, but you should plan for a possibly-serious drop in revenue. Worst-case scenario might be an average two-page drop in the SERPs for up to nine months. Best-case might be a two-position drop for two weeks... This is something you may want to test on a limited basis, to get some idea of the 'cost' of changing your URLs.
This decision to change all of your URLs is not to be made lightly, and certainly not with "expedience" as the only consideration. If your .net crew says unequivocally that you *have to* change all the URLs, fire them.
Jim
