Redesign nightmare

problem with Apache content negociation I think

[planet]

Hi,

I redesigned a site that WAS doing very well, but am unfortunately new to this and didn't research anything on redesign such as old target links cannot be left to die! I wasn't thinking about the search engines.

When I realised search engines were still sending people to the old pages I created a custom 404 page. The problem is more with Apache content negotiation. The old pages were in sub folders like aboutme/abloutme.html and now it is just aboutme.html but entering the path /aboutme/anything causes the direct path to fail on aboutme, but negotiation will find aboutme.html. That file is then called with a HTTP_PATHINFO variable set to "anything". So they get a "page" but it's not correct (CSS, images) and you get stuck on the page because the paths out are not right...... How to fix?

I created sub folders for the old links so it would at least go to a nice page but when they click a link they get to a custom 404 so I can bring them to the good home page ..... Argh! What is the solution? If anyone can even make sense of what I'm trying to say. I can give examples, but I didn't know if I can post the URL.

Thanks for your time,
Janet

PS: How is this going to affect the crawlers? I have pages I don't want indexed, they are just there to help not lose people.

[mack]

With Apache you can use Htaccess to redirect your content.

For example you might want to send a user that requests...

About_me/about.html to www.example.com/about.html

You can do this using the following method...

RedirectMatch permanent ^/about_me(.*) [example.com...]

The (.*) simple makes sure that anything within the mentioned directory is sent to the stated page.

You could add an entry for each moved directory to ensure that all requests for moved pages at least, are sent to the homepage for each section.

Using this method will also send search engine bots to your new content and may speed up the re-indexing of your new page locations.

Hope this is of some help.

Mack.

[planet]

Thank you so much for help. That is what "I" thought I needed to do too.... my tech support said no but offered no other solution.

What do you think about this?.... I created files for the old pages so if they are called it will refresh (HTML code) to the proper page. Is this a good solution? Or do I have to worry about the bots indexing these pages too?

Thx again.