Moving to new website engine

[cowboyarizona]

I have a 7 years old website and it’s time to redesign it (It was good in 1999, but in 2006 it’s looks ugly). Right now all the pages are located in the main folder and URL looks like:
www.mysite.com/item01.html
After moving to another platform the URL will be:
www.mysite.com/main_line/item01.asp

We are ranking good in the SE, 170 000 pages in the Google index, most of the traffic coming from Google.

What should I do too keep the traffic up? Some kind of permanent redirect from the old page to the new one? Like rewrite .item01.html --> /main_line/item01.asp in .htaccess?

[tedster]

As you seem to be aware, the main issue for search engine results is this -- any change in the url means it is a new url. New extension=new url. Also, for Google at least, widespread new urls with 301 redirects can sometimes cause a major bump in the road. Couple this with design/content change on every page, etc, and I would suggest planning for some lost traffic, at least for a few weeks. If you manage to escape all troubles, hats off to you!

If you were only changing file extensions from .html to .asp and your actual file names remain the same except for the extension, then consider this. It is possible to parse .html file as if it were .asp -- see this thread: Parsing .html pages as .asp [webmasterworld.com].

But I see you are also moving the files to a new directory. Unless you can point IIS to the new directory as the resource for this website (and thereby eliminate it from the url), then the url will change no matter what and the extension issue becomes irrelevant.

Yes, you can do redirects as your next resort -- make VERY sure to checkmark the "Permanent" box so you get a 301 http header. If you forget that checkmark, you will get a 302 and all kinds of complications can result over time, many of which are awful.

All this said, sometimes a site-wide redesign also results in a short term filtering by the "sandbox effect". It sounds like your site may have lots of trust established with Google, and in such cases so far, I have not seen this happen. But it certainly has been reported here by several webmasters. So be warned. If you really need the search traffic to maintain income levels, I'd suggest having a back up plan ready (PPC or direct email or tightening the belt for a bit).

It's a pretty big challenge to pull off a sitewide shift of major proportions and not have an issue or three come up.

There's one last option which several people have reported using with some success. Consider keeping the old URLs live but change the body content to be a "this page has moved here: " link. It's still a major upheaval for the site, but some people feel that a link can get Google's trust more easily and rapidly than a redirect can.

[cowboyarizona]

Tedster, thanks a lot for answer!
I’ve been thinking about to keep all the old pages with a redirecting message, it’s seems like the safe way. But if Google will see 2 pages with the same context, the ranking can be much worse. Besides, I defiantly don’t want to include the old pages to the site map. Haw Google will like that?

The 301 doesn’t seems to me as good way, we don’t move the domain, just redeveloped the site.

It’s really hard to decide, especially if wrong decision can put 20 people on the street.

[DrDoc]

Or, consider a platform move which does not result in a forced change to page names and their paths.

[wanderingmind]

Yes, dupe content if you keep both new ad old pages open to the bots.

Be very, very careful - too many pitfalls on your way.

It would have made things easier if you had chosen a CMS wchich produces pages with the same extension as earlier... even then migration is no easy task. Proceed very slowly.

[Shoestring]

This is an almost identical situation to what we just went through, Cowboy. I was very worried about losing our Google ranks, no two ways about it. It had kept me from pulling the string on the revision for a year or more, in fact. But again, like with your site 1999 just wasn't cutting it anymore.

Anyway... So far, so good. On average, we have held our ground. A few loses, but also a few gains.

We phased in the revision in stages over the course of a month, level by level. I think this helped to limit any "shock" reaction by the bot, while also helping to keep it actively visiting us for a steady stream of new/updated pages and cleaned up code.

The one difference is that we found work arounds which allowed us to keep a good 60-70% of the original url extensions. For all the others we did straight 301's and/or new extensions.

In my mind, the staggered deployment made a big difference.

Best of luck to you!