Links and redirection

links, external, redirection, old pages

[dtracker]

We are rebuilding our company site, the structure will be completeley revamped. Whats is the best way to preserve our Pagerank and external links? Some external links on partners site's are pointing to old pages that don't longer exist. We can make a redirection to the new pages, however what type of redirection is the best in this case. WEhat about a 404 page that leads to the sitemap?

Thx!

[Stefan]

We can make a redirection to the new pages, however what type of redirection is the best in this case.

A 301 in the .htaccess for every old page to new page will probably do it.

[tedster]

A 301 indicates that the page has permanently moved to a new address. If there is no other redirection in the path before arriving at the final destination page, then search engines usually allow the influence of inbound links for the old address to transfer to the new address.

However, a 404 on the old address would simply cause that old address to drop out of the listings -- and links pointing to it would no longer have any influence.