How to go dynamic...

...without losing PR, etc

[jahwz]

Ready to move a site into dynamic JSP pages from static html that have been online for close to a decade. I know how to go about redirecting, etc. but was hoping for input on how to avoid drops in PR or other "penalties" from the SE's. Will changing/redirecting all of these links hurt our position in search engines?

[robotsdobetter]

There is no such thing as a penalty for just having dynamic URLs, In fact if you search the web you'll see that dynamic URLs sometimes out rank static URLs. PR is out of date anyway, so no real use there. The ranking for these web pages your are changing URLs for will likely see drops in the ranking, there is really nothing you can do to help your position in search engines once you switch. Only thing you can do is to have all the backlinks pointing to your old web pages change to pointing to the new web pages.

[grandpa]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld jahwz.

Are you going to change the existing url's? If yes, you will lose your SE position until those new pages become indexed. So keep the existing url and use the redirects to point your dynamic JSP pages to them. Then you lose absolutely nothing and gain a dynamic site. Keep at least as many current pages that are well ranked. Adding new pages with any extention is routine for a growing site.

[madpenguin2]

I guess it depends on how your urls are formed. Are they similar to mydomain.com/articles/article-title.html. If so, you could use apache mode_rewrite (assumming your running on apache). This would yield the best results. You would never have to change the urls of the pages that are already indexed.

Brett