Tips for Moving Pages

[tkroll]

Hello,

I moved a few of my site's pages around. I moved the original page to it's new directory and relaced it with a "This page has moved" page with the link to the new location. I've also replaced the title with "old title - moved."

Is this enough to avoid duplicate content penalties? Or should I just dump the page in the original location and wait until the new page is indexed? The original pages ranked in the Top 3 on Google.

Thanks!

[jonrichd]

I don't see a problem with what you are trying to do -- while the old version of the page will be in the cache for a while, when the spiders revisit, the content will be different.

If you are pretty sure that no other sites link to the pages you moved, what you are doing will work. OTOH, if there are external links to these pages, they will continue to point to the outdated pages, and pass their PR to them.

You might want to consider using a permanent redirect using .HTACCESS to automatically redirect any visitors (including search engines) to the new pages. This is pretty easy to do if you are hosted on a *nix box; you'll find the syntax here [webmasterworld.com]. If you are on IIS and have access to IIS Manager it's also easy. If not ... more difficult unless it's an ASP page where you can include server side code.

[tkroll]

Hi jonrichd,

Thanks for the reply. I've decided to use a 301 redirect via PHP after reading further. (Sorry, should have done that first!)

Thanks