320 replies to this topic

[Randy]

I'll let one of the IIS experts tackle your redirect question scneeble. It's well outside of what I normally deal with on a normal basis, so don't want to give you any bad information.

[Pilgrimgal]

Hi All,

This is my first time using this forum... I am a complete novice, so please be kind!

I manage a website that has been redesigned. Google and many other search engines still list our old pages, or pages that I "mocked" up, using the old URLS but with the new content. This band-aid approach is clogging up our server with duplicate pages and making file management difficult, as well as making web users confused.

SO, it was suggested to me to do 301 redirects for these pages, and I tried to use the code that was suggested in this forum. But it didn't work. I am not a techy, so it could be my copying and pasting into the code at the top of the page was not the way to do it. Part of the problem is also that the old pages are .htm or .html and the new ones are .asp

There is also some concern amongst my higher ups that doing a redirect would compromise our rankings with Google since they rate on link popularity. Is that the case?

Does anyone have any suggestions for me??? They would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Pilgrimgal

[Jill]

Welcome Pilgrimgal!

You may simply want to wait for the engines to purge your old urls and find your new ones. In most cases, there's no need to redirect. Just let them get rid of the old stuff on their own.

Jill

[Randy]

Welcome Pilgrimgal !

The best way to accomplish what you're trying to is going to depend upon the type of server you're site is on. If you're on a *nix (Linux, Unix) system, placing your redirects into a .htaccess file will be the best and simplest way.

.htacess is nothing more than a simple text file. You'll want to create it with Notepad or some other plain text editor. When you upload it to the root level of your web site (the same place where you main index page resides) it should work in conjunction with your server to handle everything. Note that the .htaccess file really does start with a dot. It needs to be that way.

As far as what to put in this file to redirect the old pages to the new, it would look something like this:

CODE

Redirect 301 /old-file-name.htm http://www.yourdomain.com/new-page.asp

Putting a command like that for each of the old pages should straighten things out and allow you to delete the old pages. I would do it with just a page or two at first to make sure it works, then add all of the old pages.

If you're on a Windows server, there are some instructions a ways back in the thread on how to do that. Or just post back with what you're server is running and somebody will be by to help you sort it out.

[Pilgrimgal]

Thank you both for your helpful responses. I will try it and see what happens!

-Pilgrimgal

[PilgrimGuy]

Hi there, PilgrimGuy here. I work with Pilgrimgal, she's the website content mgr and I'm the techie. I don't do much web work for work but as a hobbie I have set up a cuppla web sites using Frontpage so I have some knowledge of web hosting and how it works. But obviously not enough or I wouldn't be posting here.

The problem we have here at work is that we had a Frontpage site up and running for several years. We got gazillions of hits annually and were pretty well up there on the search engines for a bunch of keywords. People got used to seeing us at the top of the search engine listings. We're an educational organization and teachers all over the world have our site and internal pages bookmarked.

Problem is, we recently updated the site using asp on a windows server (hosted for us). Now (or soon) all the old search results and bookmarks will no longer go to where the new data is.

We'd like to put redirects for the old pages in to point to the new corresponding pages.

I've looked around this thread and can't find anything that makes sense to me on how to do that..... probably missed it or I'm just too dumb to understand what I'm looking at.

Our boss feels that if we just remove the old pages, letting the engines drop the old and find the new, it will dramatically drop our 'find' rate, and that the currently stored bookmarks in our client schools will be frustratingly absent.

Can anyone spell out the best procedure to do this? It seems like that if this can be done, someone on this forum will have the answer.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Pilgrimguy and Pilgrimgal at www.plimoth.org

Edited by PilgrimGuy, 01 September 2004 - 02:09 PM.

[Shane]

Pilgrimguy,

1. How many unique URLs are we talking about?
2. What level of access do you have to the old server? Just FrontPage, or can you actually get into the IIS settings?

[PilgrimGuy]

I'll have to check with PilgrimGal on the actual numbers but I'm guessing in the neighborhood of 50.

I do not have personal access to the IIS as the hosting is provided thru an ISP. We don't do the actual hosting. My tech rep at the hosting company is very accomodating and will probably make changes if requested. We're a big client of his.

The new site is not done in Frontpage. I do have FTP access.

[Shane]

Okay, 50 is a very manageable number. Are they HTM's or ASP's? If they're ASP's, it's a breeze. Replace each of their contents with this code:

<%
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "<New URL Goes Here>"
%>

If they're HTM's, it's a little more complicated. You'll have to get the server administrator to change IIS so that HTM's are run through ASP.dll just like ASP's are. Then your HTM's will behave just like ASP's and you can use the code above.

Let me know if either of those will work.

[PilgrimGuy]

The old pages are HTM's, the new are asp's.

If I use the terminology you used in your last post, should the admin understand ?

Could you be a little more explicit in explaining what needs to be done, please. It might help me explain it to him and I always like learning something new !


Thanks very much for taking the time to help us. It's very much appreciated.

Dennis

[incrediblehelp]

PilgrimGuy,

Are you going to use a 301 redirect as the solution??

[BrianR]

Dennis

We have discussed this topic several times on the forum, so you might want to do a forum search on '301 redirect' - the resulting threads should give you more background info on the topic.

BrianR

[Randy]

Dennis,

Your server admin may or may not want to have .htm/.html files pre-proscessed as ASP. It adds load to the server's CPU and Memory, and if they have to change this for every site on the server they may balk at that for obvious reasons.

Ian (mcanerin) made a post on the first page of this thread of how to do what you need to accomplish for a whole site. I don't work with IIS myself, but I'm 99% sure the same can be done on an individual page level by the server admin. There's a link in Ian's post to more info on IIS server redirects.

If it were me, I would give your server admin a ring and tell them what needs to be done regarding your site changing, along with the two options. Doing the redirect at the server level, or enabling HTML pages to be pre-processed by the ASP engine. They know the server and will choose the best way to go about it for everybody involved.

By all means, feel free to reference this thread with them.

[mltgroup]

Can I use 301 redirects to redirect domains to specific pages of a new domain? And not be penalized?

e.g.

www.domain1.com (redirect to) www.domainhome.com/domain1.html
www.domain2.com (redirect to) www.domainhome.com/domain2.html
www.domain3.com (redirect to) www.domainhome.com/domain3.html

Thanks for any info.

[Randy]

Yup mltgroup. In fact a lot of multi-national sites with multiple TLD domains do exactly that!