Is this cloaking

Need to redirect without 301... or at least I think so.

[TheSeoGuy]

We have a site that we recently updated. The old site has been completely redesigned and the file names have all changed.

Our problem is that we have found that the site has a lot of links pointing to a specific file name that no longer exists. (abc.html, for example.)

Our new page that replaces the abc.html page is xyz.html.

We cannot do a site wide redirect as we are working on the same domain. And we can’t do a page specific redirect as that would take dynamic code on the original page and because the original page is an html file, we cannot change this as the new page would not be spidered.

As far as I can tell, we have two options:
Add JavaScript to the abc.html file to redirect to the xyz.html.
or
Save the new xyz.html page as abc.html also and have two different pages with duplicate content.

Would either of these methods be considered inappropriate for the search engines?

Is there any way to achieve this other then what I have discussed above?

Thanks for the help.

[encyclo]

Are you on an Apache server? If so, then you can put this in your root-level .htaccess:

Redirect permanent /abc.html http://www.example.com/xyz.html

[TheSeoGuy]

No. Our hosting is all Windows IIS.

[zilla]

I have been thinking on this problem for a while but no solution yet.. just avoid duplicate content at all cost.

[MrSpeed]

This is not considered cloaking.

See message #380 in this thread for some ideas.
[webmasterworld.com...]
You want to use a 301 redirect.

After you make the changes run the url through a http header checker to make sure it is a 301.

[TheSeoGuy]

Thanks for the input everyone.

It is much appreciated.