Successful 301 Redirection?

Switching a website to an entirely new technology, URLS, etc

[supermanu]

Dear webmasterworld members,

We are about to switch our website to an entire new technology:

- ASP => PHP
- New URLs (based on mod rewrite)
- New title metatag
- New title H1
- Updated content

We are planning to do a 301 redirection for our entire website and we do think have all necessary information for this.

However, we did the same method twice and different results occurred:

first website: No or few drops for our main keywords
Second website: BIG DROP for our main keywords, a real catastrophe in term of result

I do not know why it works on first and not the second method and I cannot figure that out.
After reading information about the method, I figure out that all was not doing as an ideal world:

"You will see a temporary drop in the rankings, because Google has to do back-end processing in order to pass the old URLs' PageRank to the new URLs when it finds the 301 redirects. It can take anywhere from a few days to several months for everything to return to normal, depending on the PageRank of the original URL, and depending on how often your URLs are spidered. " as jdMorgan said on [webmasterworld.com...]

The third website represent roughly 95% of our activity and I want to make sure that no mistake is done.
We are satisfied with current ranking and we of course do not want to have a massive drop in term of inquiries

What would you recommend?

Option 1: use same URL (no 301) and keep the content as closed to as it was before (keyword density same, title H1, title metatag same)
Option 2: 301 but keep the content as closed to as it was before (keyword density same, title H1, title metatag same)
Option 3: go for full redirection and change of content

Any other option?

I thank you very much in advance for your help

[AnkitMaheshwari]

You might see drop in the rankings as a result of 301 which might take upto 6 months to stabilize.

However, if 301 is really essential, then do not go with full bang. Do it in small sections one at a time. Also, till the time PR and ranking start to come to normalcy, try and avoid any change in content or titles or metas.

Changing everything at one go is not the risk I would take.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Also, keep in mind that 301 would not help you in Yahoo rankings.

[bwnbwn]

Just because your changing your technology dosen't mean you have to change the url's
I would keep the url's the same as with the page content on the rebuild. This by far is the best, safest, and continues to pass ALL link juice to the internal pages that are linked.
Done this way I doubt you will see any drop in the SE's.

AnkitMaheshwari is correct Yahoo does not process a 301 good at all and you most likely will lose all the yahoo serp positions.

[supermanu]

Dear Ankit and Bwnbwn,

Thank you for these good advices

Obviously you recommend me to be conservative

We changed the content, title H1 and title metatags to get better results in search engines

We changed the URL to put them more near the roots and avoid our initial folder structure (better for page rank propagation)

ROOT/cityname/default.asp => ROOT/cityname.php