redeveloping site: how to redirect old URLs on IIS?

[fizzycherry]

I am redeveloping a large site at present which is hosted on IIS 6. The old site was completely static, HTML only and had hundreds of pages. The new site will be fully content managed (using a PHP based system) and use a URL rewriting component (IISRewrite) to create search engine friendly URLs.

The vast majority of the corresponding new URLs will differ considerably from the old ones. I am anxious to ensure a smooth changeover and redirect all the old URLs so that the redevelopment will not have a negative impact on organic search rankings or deter the spiders from crawling the new version of the site.

Is my only option to leave all the old files on the site and set up a 301 redirect on each individually using IIS manager or is there a simpler less time consuming way of doing this?

Will the above method at least handle the migration in a search engine friendly manner?

Thanks in advance :)

[paulanthony]

I have recently undertaken this task - I set up a custom 404 page which read from an xml file then response.redirected to the correct url. However it was in .NET...

[Sean_R]

I've done the same task in .net but you should be able to use your url rewrite module to redirect ANY page request (even static .html pages) to the new page with a 301 redirect.

I use the free mod_rewrite ISAPI dll which is independant of asp.net or asp engines to do this.

HTH

Sean