Redirect - Retaining Links

Keeping my links using Redirect

[dave_c00]

Hi,

I am just about to launch a new re-vamped site that changes the way that some of the urls are displayed. All of the product pages are staying the same which is the bulk of the site but the category pages are all different as sivved through the products and created a better category structure. So that Google redirects the user to the correct page I have used,

Redirect Permanent /url1 /url2

within my htaccess file to do this. My question is - How will the search engines treat this when they do their spidering?

Will they eventually replace url1 with url2 in the listing or see it as url1 still?

My apologies if this is in the wrong forum and should be in the Google - SEO forum.

Thanks in advance,

Dave

[g1smd]

They will replace the listing.

Make sure the redirect target also contains the protocol and the domain name, so that requests for www and non-www old URLs both end up at the correct place in a single hop.

If you use RewriteRule anywhere else within your site, then do not use Redirect or Redirectmatch for these new rules. Use RewriteRule for all of the rules.

Useful comments also in [webmasterworld.com...]

Make sure the redirect is a 301 redirect.

[dave_c00]

Thanks

[jdMorgan]

I just went through replacing one URL. It took about five days for all of Google's search servers to start consistently showing the new URL in search results listings. However, the speed of this search results update depends on how well the old URL ranks, how often the pages that link to it are spidered, and how much those linking pages are trusted. It can take anywhere from three days to several months according to reports posted here.

If it isn't clear from the above, make sure that all pages on your own site link to the new URLs, not the old ones, and that you only use the 301 redirect to "correct" old links on third-party sites, and to expedite the search engines' update of their listings. However, you need to be sure that at least one link out on the Web points to the old URL, so that search engines will follow that old link and "find" your redirect.

Jim