Old links Redirect on New links solution instead of 301 Redirection

[ramnikarathi]

Hi

I am renewing my website with new look & feel and content. I have changed old url's with new one in proposed site,my question is this, By due to all this changes "How will google maintain all those cached links or how i will manage it? Will i loose all my old links rank ?" I can not redirect all old links to new one bcoz its in hudge amount. So suggest me how we will manage my all cached pages.
Please reply ASAP.

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Thanks & Regards

Ramnika Rathi

[edited by: tedster at 3:00 pm (utc) on Mar 26, 2010]

[gn_wendy]

do a 301

relaunched a site with new URLs about a year ago. we did 301s for more than a million sites. Didn't even take that long to set up.

[TheMadScientist]

Hi ramnikarathi,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Finding a way to redirect is definitely the way to go if you must change the URLs, and make sure you only use one redirect to get visitors to the final location, because it seems the more redirects you have in a row the more 'link weight' you lose between the original location and the final location.

To say the number of redirects is the reason you cannot means you should probably look in to regular expression use, because someone who is good with the use of regular expressions can usually find a way to redirect many page with few rules, making it so you can redirect all pages to the new locations.

To retain all 'link weight' it is actually advised to rewrite the content from the new system to the old URLs rather than redirecting the old URLs to the new locations. The difference is the URLs on your site would not change, but the content, look and feel would be sent from the new URLs to the old ones, so your site looks 'shiny and new' but the URLs remain as they are, unchanged.

[ramnikarathi]

Hello,

But we have a huge no. of urls. Its around 4 lakhs. this is impossible to redirect all the urls. so give me a another easy solution.

Thanks & Regards

Ramnika Rathi

[gn_wendy]

Okay. Just to clarify you want to migrate 400K (400,000) pages to a new URL system.

You have two choices: do nothing and lose all your rankings

OR

Set up a 301 to redirect all your pages. Like I said, we've done it for over one million...

[tedster]

There is a third choice: locate and redirect just the key pages - the ones that have the strong backlinks or are otherwise a major entry page. Then make sure that the other old URLs return a 404.

I've used this approach with large sites that have a hopelessly tangled URL "scheme" and are redeveloping. It's worked rather well.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Adding to what tedster suggested, you can find the top pages with maximum incoming links from your Google Webmaster Account.

[g1smd]

Not just those with maximum incoming links, but landing pages with the most incoming traffic.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Another thing to note is that if you are using htaccess file for redirects than the load time might increase for the site with many redirect commands added in the htaccess.