Redoing a large site, and will have new structure

Will use 301 to pass users/SEs on, but for how long?

[thaedge]

Currently am redoing a site with 10,000+ pages in SE's. Question is how best to move SE's and users over to new site? The plan is to use a 301 redirect with some logic to parse the old url, grab variables and send user to the new page. This solves part of the problem, but then leaves me with 2 site structures on 2 servers going at the same time. Is there a better way that someone has done b4? Has someone done this b4 and if so did you leave the old site up for 1 month or 2 or 3? For safety and slow SE's we planned 2-3 months at the max and 1 month min.

- Ive searched around WWWorld and have yet to find something similar to this exact question.

Any ideas/thoughts/comments are welcome.

Thanks in advance

[Span]

I never redid a 10.000+ pages site.
But I do know that if you use 301 redirects there's no need to leave the old pages on the server. No one will see them anymore.

But about slow SE's.. let me tell you I am still seeing 404's for pages that were deleted in 1999.

[thaedge]

Guess not alot of folks have had to go through this.

[encyclo]

If you're using mod_rewrite or another mechanism to serve 301 redirects, then you should remove your old URLs as they are completely inaccessible once the redirects are in place - therefore you don't ever need to maintain two directory structures or two separate servers.

The guidelines for a 10k page site are not much different from for smaller sites - it's not just the search engine bots you've got to cater for, but also the backlinks from third-party sites deeplinking into your old directory structure, as well as users with bookmarked pages. You can safely assume the site will be fully reindexed in three months, but for the rest it's much longer. Look at keeping your redirect mechanism in place for an absolute minimum of 12 months, and if possible, more or less indefinitely. As I said, you're not actually maintaining two structures, and the server overhead for a bit of mod_rewriting is not huge and can easily be catered for.

[bumpaw]

Is there a simple redirect that basically says if the file is not found send the user to the home page automatically? On Apache server that is.

[thaedge]

Site is on Win 2K servers and runs on ColdFusion 5.

The redirect to the homepage is too simple for all of the pages. We dont want to lose users in the move over and we want search engines to follow to the new site.

Just got some good news regarding this, the main directory/path structure will remain the same. Smaller not as visible portions will be changing only. :)