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Redirecting Old Urls After Web Site Overhaul

Answer 1

+5 A:

Honestly, I would suggest that you change ISP's. 301's are an important tool in any webmaster's toolbox, and for them to block that will penalize you terribly. You could easily transfer your domain to another IP address, wait for the DNS propagation, and then do your rollout.

From Google's Webmaster tools:

Use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect all pages on your old site to your new site. This tells search engines and users that your site has permanently moved. We recommend that you move and redirect a section or directory first, and then test to make sure that your redirects are working correctly before moving all your content.

Don't do a single redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it's not a good user experience. It's more work, but a page-to-page redirect will help preserve your site's ranking in Google while providing a consistent and transparent experience for your users. If there won't be a 1:1 match between pages on your old site and your new site (recommended), try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

I'm sure that's much easier said then done, but I would never want an ISP that exerted that kind of filter against their clients.

womp 2009-08-08 02:32:22

Answer 2

+2 A:

Can you do a 302 redirect at least? I do agree with what womp says though, what ISP would block 301 redirects? Dump them. ISPs are a dime a dozen.

Haacked 2009-08-08 05:03:00

Were it my choice...Kudos to the ASP.NET MVC stuff. I have it in two separate projects now. Other than the ISP quirkiness it works great. Markup looks fantastic compared to ASP.NET.

Robert Harvey 2009-08-08 17:00:31

Answer 3

A:

I completely agree with womp. I cannot believe that an ISP would block 301's.

I was so surprised that you can't do a 301 redirect on Network Solutions, because they're not exactly a two bit operation.

Their own marketing material suggests that you can. There's also a forum post by someone wanting to do a 301 redirect. Although they use a .htaccess, the reply from a Network Solutions tech support shows the user how to do a 301 redirect in ASP.

Dan Atkinson 2009-08-08 11:32:49

Network Solutions is who I'm working with. You must have seen one of my other questions. GRR.

Robert Harvey 2009-08-08 16:58:01

Answer 4

A:

If you opt to not change ISP then the simples solution is to display a page where you say that the page has been moved with a link to the new page link, then you add a 5 second delay that re-directs using a HTML meta tag:

<html>
<head>
<title>Page moved</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://example.com/newurl"&gt;
</head>
<body>
The page has been moved, click <a href="http://example.com/newurl"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; if you have not been re-directed to the new page within 5 seconds.
</body>
</html>

Alternatively you could use a URL rewriter, that way the old url "points" to the new page, there are basically two ways of doing this, the programmatically way is to create your own VirtualPathProvider, the second way is to use a URL Rewriter module like the IIS Url Rewrite Module.

Inge Henriksen 2009-08-08 14:40:07

I considered this, but I don't want to risk Google interpreting these pages as still existing, and there is some precedent for some search engines (including Google) interpreting these kinds of pages as hacker behavior.

Robert Harvey 2009-08-08 17:15:10

Then you should rewrite your url like i also sugggested, or change your isp.

Inge Henriksen 2009-08-08 19:31:21

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Redirecting Old Urls After Web Site Overhaul

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