Permanent Redirect from a .htm to a.asp page.

Permanent Redirect

[xdrone]

I've got a major problem. I've recently redesigned our site. Our old site was built using the .htm extension and the new design uses .asp! This has caused all our listings in Google to return a 404 error. I have spoken to our hosting partners in an attempt to have them redirect the request via the properties on the .htm files in IIS permanently but they indicated they do not have the ability to do this because of security issues. I have also reviewed the previous post by webmasterworld members and they refer to the Apache server using .htaccess, or in my case, the 301 error method which I have tested without success since the "301 Moved permanently" is not being read by a "simulation spider" and returns a status "200 successful".

How do I update Google with the new URls?

Would spiders return a status code of 200 if the page indicates a 301 moved permanently?

[Krapulator]

301's should be picked up by Google OK.

[Krapulator]

Assuming you've configured it correctly

[Krapulator]

Welcome BTW!

[seanetal]

drone,

I had to move alot of my earlier content and google has some links to the old content but the majority of the links have been updated. It seemed to take 2 or 3 crawls before the old links were gone and the new ones were etched into the GoogleStone.

Sean

[aspdesigner]

they refer to the Apache server using .htaccess, or in my case, the 301 error method which I have tested without success...

If you are using ASP, you are probably hosting on Windows and not UNIX, so those solutions are unlikely to be of any help.

You could also write ASP code to generate a 301, but the problem with that is that the settings on your server will likely not allow you to run ASP code from a .htm file.

This can be changed with server settings, but I suspect your hosting company won't want to do that either.

We had this happen with a site a couple of years back, our experience was similar to Sean's.

What I would suggest is to make sure to delete all the old .htm files (especially index.htm!), and to make sure that your new index.asp has links to all your new pages.

You may also want to consider getting a few new inbound links directly to some of the key pages to help things along. For example, a link from another Google-listed site explicitly to -

[mysite.com...]

If you have another Google-listed site, you might use it to do this, then change the link back to normal if you wish once the problem has been solved.

[whats up skip]

All of the above solutions will take several updates/months to correct the problem. In the mean time traffic and probably business will dry up.

Why not keep the htm pages and place a bit of code to make the browsers redirect to the new asp page. Also place a link visable to google in the page pointing to the new asp page.

For a Google update or two both pages would appear in the index. One may rank higher than the other. When the new asp pages have been picked up by Google and established (normally takes two updates) delete the htm pages just before the Google bot comes calling.

For those of you who are concerned, the pages will normally appear different enough for Google not to treat them as exactly the same page.

[The_Hitcher]

Under the iis settings for your website on the server (if its windows based that is), your ISP merely has to define the default document. Generally the default is htm & html but it takes but a second to add for instance, index.asp.

What lazy hosts you have......

[HenryUK]

Another alternative, which might help as a short term measure, would be to create a custom 404 page with the ability to parse your old .htm addresses.

This is likely to be helpful only if the name/path to your htm files was consistent and logical.

Ultimately if you can sort it a 301 will be better though...