Forum Moderators: phranque
I have a question about options for redirecting old pages to new pages. I am a new webmaster to a site with a top ranked site with LOT of history and am looking for solutions about how to transition our old site to a new dynamic site.
Basically, here is the situation. A year or so ago we released a new dynamic site to replace our sprawling html-based site. We made the decision to leave up the old site while we were moving materials into our new database (we have over 300 resources on the old site, and this has been a two-year process to revise materials, make sure they validate, etc).
However, most of our materials have now been moved and I'd like to start redirecting the old site in its entirety so that our users are now accessing the most up-to-date content. The problem is, at this point, no redirects have been put into place, and close to 50% of our hits are still showing up for the old site (with good reason, some of those old pages have been there for 8 or more years).
So I have two questions. First, how do redirects impact search engine results? Our old content is on our new site, but the search engines are still directing people to the old pages in many cases. I don't want to lose those rankings, nor those hits, from the old site.
Second, is there a particular method of redirecting that is better? I'm running RHL enterprise edition 4, apache web server, etc. The pages I want to redirect are, unfortunately, all html so I'll have to put them in manually. Any suggestions in this area would be most appreciated.
Thank you for your help,
Dana
It would have been possible to use the new setup with the old names - but I suspect there's little to be gained trying that now - others may know better.
It would essential to promote the new site, and get links to the old updated where possible, especially those on trusted sites and quality directories.
Also, if I redirect the entire site people will have to renavigate through the resources to find the ones they were looking for. Although it is more work, I was thinking about redirecting individual resources to their new location.
