Redirects?

Redirect

[se4rchsiren]

The site I am working on is currently having a new design plus changes to the directory structure, therefore I need to know the best way to redirect the traffic.

The website is very busy therefore it is sat on a web cluster and load balancing is used to distrube the traffic.

The current website directory structure is for example

www.examplesite.com/directory1/directory2/direcory3/file.htm

the new site will be
www.examplesite.com/directory1/directory2/file.htm

so I need to know the best way to redirect the current listings on the search engines to the new webpages and also make the robots index the new pages with out affecting the website ranking especially on Google, as we have a PR8.

Can you help? :-)

[DaveAtIFG]

Hi se4rchsiren, I suggest that you start by reading message #2 in this thread [webmasterworld.com] and exploring the links. Our resident experts are happy to help people REFINE their mod_rewrite directives.

[se4rchsiren]

hi DaveAtIFG

I already used Mod_rewrite as this is a dynamic site- I really want to know the best method to redirect the traffic whilst the spiders are finding the new pages, without affecting the current ranking.

I understand we have to find the information our self, but I have read lots of postings and I'm at a lost.

Do I use a redirect on each page?
Do I use .htaccess?

Or can anyone tell me of a good resources for either of these options.

Thanks

[DaveAtIFG]

Sorry se4rchsiren, I didn't read your question carefully. The consensus among our regulars is to use a rewrite (mod_rewrite) or redirect (mod_alias) directive in .htaccess that returns a 301 error code indicating that a page has moved permanently, spiders are reported to easily detect these and update your URLs. Since a meta tag type redirect on each page will return a 200 error code, the URLs are unlikely to be updated.

[se4rchsiren]

Hi Dave

Thanks for your advice. Much appreciated.

:-)