When, how to drop 301s from old version of site

[esfusion]

Ten months ago I updated my site and moved from html to asp file extensions.

I was hoping to put 301s to all of the equivalent pages in order to keep my page rank, but my ISP would only let me put a 301 on my home page. I assumed Google would gradually stop visiting my old pages and they would drop out of the index.

Almost all of my external links are to my root page.

Google has indexed my new site and my new homepage has more or less inherited the page rank of my old site. My new interior pages all have been crawled and have page rank. However, for many key search terms my old pages are the ones that are returned. Sometimes an old page is returned one week and the new page is returned the next.

Since many old and new pages are virtually identical, I also worry that Google may be penalizing me.

1. Should I now remove all of the old pages using a 410 or some other command? Or am I better off just continuing to wait?

2. Is there a way to use 301s on my interior pages without getting my ISP involved? If there is, is this worth doing?

3. Is it possible that Google is penalizing both my new and old pages since there is considerable duplication?

[tedster]

The only way I know to do page by page redirects in this situation would be to use a specific vbscript on each of the old html pages - but I'm not sure your web host would authorize vbscript to execute a url with an .html extension. You might ask if that seems like it makes sense, given the total number of pages you would have to deal with.

At the admin level in IIS, it is possible to allow pages with the .html extension to be parsed through asp (see http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum47/2405.htm [webmasterworld.com]). Then you might just remove the NEW urls and leave the old ones. Again, this requires some changes at the admin level that would be up to your web host.

If the ideas above aren't practical, then I would probably advise taking down all the .html extension pages. Make sure those urls return a 404 status in the server header, and then let Google crawl just the new pages. This would, most likely, create a ranking problem on Google for a while, but it should eventually recover for you. It is best to get those dupe pages out of the picture.

Another possibility is to move to a new host who is more accomodating. But whatever, you do, I suggest having a Webmster Tools account and monitoring the reports in there. If you have an extended ranking problem, that also establishes a verified communication line where you can send a "reconsideration request" and explain your situation. Also, you'll probably want to ask more technical questions about ASP - we have a dedicated forum for that: IIS and asp.NET forum [webmasterworld.com]

All my comments are assuming that your domain name is still the same. If that also changed, then the situation gets a lot more complex.