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Please, one of you internet gurus, help me out with a small problem. :)
I am having a major update/revamping in my site. For that, URL's of 1000 pages will be changing. Those 1000 pages are not yet dispayed on Google, but I assume that they are crawled, since
- I could see it in the log file
- Using the google toolbar, I could see that those pages are already ranked. So I assume that there is a possibility that Google has already indexed them and thus the ranking. (Please correct me if this concept is wrong) :o)
Now how do I handle the major update? Earlier all the pages were placed in a folder, say "oldfolder". I would be making new pages in another folder, say "newfolder". All the URL's and the filenames will be completely different.
Let me bring forward some options that were in my mind
1) Since those "oldfolder" pages are not yet displayed on Google, should I block them from my robots.txt file? Would that help in avoiding Google display these URL's or is it that since Google has already crawled the site, there is no way I could restrict it from displaying thses URL's?
2) I had read somewhere that I could give something like "HTTP status 301 redirects" or "HTTP status 302 redirects". What is this? Where can I read more about this?
3) Should I delete the files from "oldfolder" and give redirect to the main page of the "newfolder"? Or should I keep both the copies?
Please help me! I am desperate. I do not want the pagerank to drop because of this revamping.
Thanks in advance for any help. :)
IM
I would recommend doing 301 (which is permanent rather than temp 302) redirects using .htaccess for each of your pages in the old folder to point to the new when accessed.
Do a search using the search function for 31 redirects.
