Best technique for sitewide file renames

[Macguru]

Hi,

Some site is already well established in many SE indexes, with some good spots here and there. Link structure, directory structure and filenames are to be redone. The site has about 3k pages. It would be a nightmare to synchronise old content with new URIs.

I think of a custom 404 page with main navigation to limit damages during the process.

Is it the best option for a limited budget job?
Any other option or pitfalls to avoid?

[ariet]

In my opinion, every site on the WWW should have a custom 404-page (as well as a 500-page and others, if applicable).

See Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox on this: [useit.com...]

[Nick_W]

Is the problem actually renaming the files or is it what the consequences of renaming the files will be?

Nick

[Macguru]

The problem is just the consequences of SE indexes pointing to wrong urls, and the temporary loss of traffic. Renaming files is no problem by itself.

They look like this now

www.domain.com/12-03-02/117.htm

and we want to make them look like this :

www.domain.com/spring/blue-flower.htm

for some reason. ;)

[Nick_W]

Hmmm.. can't see anyway round it Mac...

The only thing you can do is to setup the 404 and ride it out... Sorry ;)

nick

[mole]

How's this for an idea..........

Don't rename the old files, instead copy them to the new files.
Then, overwrite the old files with one-liners that redirect to the matching new files.

Makes sense?

You can zap the old files after a few days / weeks when everything's settled down on the new structure.

[Nick_W]

Damn fine idea mole! - I can't see a problem with that ;)

Except, 3000 files. Oouch!

Nick

[Macguru]

We thought of leaving the old version untouched and up for a while. We wondered about duplicate content and having a footlong robots.txt.

mole, what kind of redirect will do best for spiders? I am hesitant with refresh.

>>Except, 3000 files. Oouch!

And not counting images!

[mole]

>what kind of redirect will do best for spiders?

sorry, I'm not enough of a spider expert to give a good answer.

But, regarding the number of files involved, a solution which would work well if it's on a *nix box would be to generate a script to do all the renaming etc. I presume there's a list or at least a set of rules which defines how old_html_file or old_image gets renamed as new_whatever.

I did something similar recently with about 18,000 files, the script took about five minutes to run.

[seoRank]

Be a little careful with redirects...mass redirects can look like cloaking resulting your site to get banned.

[Macguru]

mole,

I believe mass renaming is very good to provide some dynamic site with 'clean' urls. But wont fit our needs for this case. We are looking for getting the most of existing content by doing pages case by case. Lets say a page is about "bleu gizmo" it will get "blue gizmo" in all the nice spots -I believe filename is one of thoses- and linked to from other pages containing this text.

ariet,

Thanks for the link, and welcome to the board!

I am looking for a cheap and safe solution not to loose SE traffic until they update their index. Blocking old version with robots.txt and meta refresh to newer page is an option, so is custom 404. User wise, we prefer the first option even if more expensive. But we wonder how most SE will react to this.

Is doing permanent server side redirects for each page expensive? I am a server illeterate. ;)

[Macguru]

Ok guys, I found a good script. It automatically redirects user to newer url.

A freebee.

[willmaster.com...]