301 Redirects

[MikeTowers]

Hi,

The company I work for has a web site which ranks well in most search engines including Google.

The company is in the process of rebranding and of course wants to setup a new website in the new company name. We have obtained the relevant domain names and setup a small number of pages on the new site which will be added to over the coming months before a main launch early next year.

To try and get more links to the new site the company wants to have all of the images on the old site reference the new site i.e. change all image references from the old site to the new site.

Rather than change to links in the pages on the old site they want to do a 301 redirect on the image folder on the old site and leave the links in the pages as they are for the foreable future.

My question is this, won't Google and the other search engines find it strange if we don't update the links in the pages so that they point to new site. I can understand thre redirect being ok in the short term but if we kept the redirect in place for months without making any effort to update the pages then surely this would be seen as strange?

From my point of view we could use the 301 redirect as a temporary measure until we have updated the page links and then remove it.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks

Mike

[edited by: pageoneresults at 5:16 pm (utc) on Aug. 16, 2006]
[edit reason]
[1][edit reason] Removed Old Site/New Site URI References [/edit] [/edit][/1]

[Christoval]

301 redirects are done by the server, before a page is shown to a browser, or bot. So as long as you list your 301 redirects correctly, to the right "new" pages, then you will be fine.

The company i work for recently did the exact same thing, and Our google PR has been fine, and we are enjoying healthy growth as well.

[jdancing]

On Windows IIS the 301 redirect normally needs to be on the actual pages. I suppose if you were an IIS guru and you had full server access there may be a way to do the redirect on the server.