Moving website from an old " Free Page"

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Moving website from an old " Free Page"

Time to change isp

Lovejoy

6:31 pm on Feb 6, 2010 (gmt 0)

Hi All,

I've got an old " Home Page" from the pioneer days of the web I set up in 1996. It was offered as part of my original internet package and is hosted on their sever Eg.http://www.oldisp.ca/widgets.

The company has been making a lot of changes and it appears that they are going to soon discontinue the old free pages. The problem being this old site ranks from #1-5 on all of its main keywords on Google.ca and I'm not sure how to move all the content to a proper domain and maintain the ranking.

I do have a similar site with its own domain listed as a .com and ranks highly on Google.com, but ranks nowhere on Google .ca ( the old free page is on a Canadian ISP's server). The traffic from the old site is considerable and I don't want to lose it. Any ideas how to migrate this free page and maintain the traffic/rank?

piatkow

6:42 pm on Feb 6, 2010 (gmt 0)

The way I did this was to set up domain and hosting and frame all the old pages.
I changed home page links on the old site to go to the new domain name
I then created new pages to a new design replacing the framed pages one by one, updating a Google site map as I ent along.

That may or may not be the best approach for you but it worked for me. The time lag between starting the new site and loosing the old site meant that I had a window to get inbound links redirected.

rocknbil

9:12 pm on Feb 6, 2010 (gmt 0)

How much time have you got? Can you apply .htaccess?

Start 301'ing the old pages ASAP, if you can, this should minimize the damage.

Lovejoy

11:29 pm on Feb 6, 2010 (gmt 0)

I have no access to the sever other than basic ftp and can't run any scripts. I figure I have about 3 months from the sounds of things

rocknbil

3:47 am on Feb 7, 2010 (gmt 0)

Yes . . . but . . . is mod_rewrite supported via .htaccess.

Put two files on your server. test1.html, test2.html, with simple content in them so when viewed you know which is which.

Upload them to the domain root.

Paste the following in a file and name it exactly .htaccess

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^test1.html$ /test2.html
</IfModule>

Upload it to the domain root.

Request test1.html from your browser, if you see test2.html . . . you're golden. Dig around the Apache forum for how to properly 301 files from here to the equivalent files on your new domain.

3 months should be plenty of time, I'd think, to get it all 301'ed.

buckworks

4:39 am on Feb 7, 2010 (gmt 0)

Prepare for a bumpy ride.

Even if you can set up 301 redirects (or any other kind of redirect), their usefulness may be limited if the old site is taken "off the air" too soon.

Getting old links updated should be a high priority here.

Identify as many links pointing to the old site as you can find, and also identify which links have been sending the most traffic. Don't be overwhelmed if the number is large. Make the busiest links your priority for getting updated, and work your way down from there as best you can. If you can salvage links that are sending real traffic, that will be a pretty good proxy for salvaging link juice too.

As soon as your redirects are working, start contacting the webmasters to let them know about the change of domain and request that they update their link(s).

Make it easy for them, and let them know exactly which page the link is on that you'd like updated, and provide the exact URL that you'd like it updated to. Some will do it, some won't, but most webmasters would appreciate a note that helped them prevent a broken link on their site.

Lovejoy

4:59 am on Feb 7, 2010 (gmt 0)

As far as I'm aware mod_rewrite is not supported

buckworks

5:17 am on Feb 7, 2010 (gmt 0)

Ewww ... that will make your job harder, although not impossible.

If you have to settle for something like an HTTP refresh, it would be less elegant than 301 redirects, but would still show other webmasters that your request to update their links was legitimate.

You likely already know this, but some folks reading this might want to know that to achieve the refresh, this snippet goes between the <head></head> on every page that needs to be redirected.

<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://www.example.com/the-new-URL-this-page-should-redirect-to">

The number before the url (zero, in this case) tells the browser how many seconds to wait before redirecting to the new url.

If you wished, you could set this to delay a few seconds and add some optional text to the page <body>, perhaps a little note like this:

"We are redirecting you to our new site. Please update your bookmarks."