SEO for Moving a Website Feature

[pgowder]

We have an events calendar written in PHP that we are upgrading and moving to a new script. All the urls will change.

This one of our sites most popular features.

Do I need to put up redirects or anything else to help with SEO?

Is this something I should do at the server level? With PHP?

Any advice would be great!

Thanks!

[TechnoBear]

If you change the URL of a page, you should set a 301 redirect via the .htaccess file so that search engines and anybody with the old URL bookmarked will automatically end up on the correct page and not with a 404 error.

[pgowder]

I'm on IIS, I don't think I can use a .htaccess file. ???

How would I do that on IIS?

[TechnoBear]

Ah - good question. As that's more of a server question than an SEO question, do you want me to move the thread to the Server Config forum? If you're still hoping for more SEO-related responses, you can leave this thread here and open a new one there.

[ralph.m]

How would I do that on IIS?

I'm sure Google will dig up a lot of answers to that. This was my first hit:

http://www.trainsignal.com/blog/iis7...ws-server-2008

[pgowder]

I'm sure Google will dig up a lot of answers to that. This was my first hit:

http://www.trainsignal.com/blog/iis7...ws-server-2008

Thanks, I knew how to do that.

What I wanted answered, was for SEO what would be the best way?

Thanks

[ralph.m]

Thanks, I knew how to do that.

What I wanted answered, was for SEO what would be the best way?

Hm, in post #3 you asked how to do a page redirect in IIS. Anyway, I agree with TechnoBear in terms of using a 301 redirect. If you do that, Google will see that the page has moved and will transfer any credit from the old page to the new one.

[pgowder]

Hm, in post #3 you asked how to do a page redirect in IIS. Anyway, I agree with TechnoBear in terms of using a 301 redirect. If you do that, Google will see that the page has moved and will transfer any credit from the old page to the new one.

Sorry, yes I did ask that. I was thinking that I needed to do something like an .htaccess file in the web.config instead of just doing the redirects. Since it is a php script, will doing the redirect on the script fix it for all the pages?

So if we have event.php?eventid=1 and I redirect event.php will Google be ok with the page eventid=1?

[ralph.m]

if we have event.php?eventid=1 and I redirect event.php will Google be ok with the page eventid=1?

Hm, I'm not sure about all the issues involved there, but it sounds like it might be a job for the cononical link:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...canonical.html

Are you saying that ?eventid=1 will no longer do anything?

[pgowder]

That's what I need to decide. Should I set it so that eventid=1 do something?

What is best?

[ralph.m]

I guess it depends on what the page needs to do. What is a new setup? Does the new version need query strings at all? I wouldn't include them if you don't need them. I would just make sure that any old links that include them still land on an appropriate page.

[pgowder]

No the new version will use WP permalinks.

So you think I need to redirecdt eventid=1 to the new system and the exact event on the new system?

[ralph.m]

Is the info at eventid=1 short term or is it expected to last for a long time? If it's an expired event, it might be fine for users just to end up at the event home page. But if the content at eventid=1 is permanent, and will in future be stored at a different URL, then I'd be looking at a more elaborate redirect setup that would redirect links like that to a specific, equivalent page.

[pgowder]

Most will be older events. But some people do use them for historical info.

[pgowder]

Any other suggestions?