switching from dynamic to static urls

can it be done without affecting rankings too much?

[pweaver]

Hi there,

A client of mine is having his cold fusion site with dynamic urls swithed over to html.

We have already established the site well in search engines and I've set up lots of links pointing to specific pages on the site, ie direct links from other sites to pages like [example.com...]

If the above page were to become [example.com...] is there any way that we could make the switch smoothly without hurting rankings in SEs?

The links to the dynamic pages are pretty much permanent as it would be too much work for me to contact those sites and have them change to the new html urls.

Thanks for any thoughts.

[edited by: pageoneresults at 11:40 pm (utc) on April 14, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified URI References [/edit]

[SEOViking]

The new URLs will never get any advantage from the old links because they are pointing to a different URL, but you can get the new URLs indexed through the old links by using 301 redirects so that when the spider follows those links or just directly visits the old URLs it will see that they are moved.

You could remind the people linking to the old pages that it might be in their best interest to update their outgoing links so they are not pointing to URLs that aren't being used anymore (but maybe that isn't life or death if/since you use 301 redirects--so just don't tell them you are using redirects bc then they'll think the links are actually dead and will be more motivated to fix them than if they knew they just redirected to the right URL).

[pweaver]

"The new URLs will never get any advantage from the old links because they are pointing to a different URL, but you can get the new URLs indexed through the old links by using 301 redirects so that when the spider follows those links or just directly visits the old URLs it will see that they are moved."

Don't 301 redirects allow PR to be passed on the new pages?