Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have configured in IIS for it to treat .asp as .aspx and so have managed to keep old URLs the same for any pages that we consider would get a lot of landing traffic.
However for future it would be good to shift over to the .aspx extension - mostly due to Visual Studio reacting a bit better to such files!
What's the best way forward - create a .asp and am .aspx version of said pages, which will trap traffic headed to the old links, but allow a transition over to .aspx (expecially if we change all internal links etc) - or will that just cause duplicate content issues?
Anyone any advice on best setp forward with this migration please?
Thanks.
The best solution is to keep all of the old URLs intact as .asp and continue to use the .asp extension on the file names on the server. This should be the least amount of work.
The second best solution is to use the .aspx extension for the files on the server, but continue to use .asp in the URL in all links on the pages, and then employ a Rewrite that simply takes the requested .asp URL and fetches the content from the equivalent .aspx file on the server (while letting the user continue to see the .asp URL).
The next best solution would be to use all .aspx files and all .aspx URLs, and set up a redirect such that any requests for the old .asp URLs are fed a Redirect to the new .aspx URL. This will lead to a drop in rankings as you are in effect starting again with a new site.
You need to be very clear on the differences between a rewrite and a redirect to implement what I have just written.
The rewrite sounds good - any pointers on how to go about that - I could do that for all links I guess - sounds like the best of both worlds.
If you are using IIS, then things are more complex and you'll probably benefit from a look round [webmasterworld.com...] instead.
