Moving Content / 301 Redirects

Marketing
1

Hi,

I’m not sure if this should be posted here…wasn’t quite sure where was best.

I’m looking for any advice/suggestions with the following please…

I’ve been working on a major redesign of our site which required us to use a new CMS (Wordpress). We’ve manually transferred about 300 pages of key content (of approx 15,000). The remainder of the content I am going to leave as an archive.

Currently the site is:

http://www.mysite.com/100/

The new CMS is at:

http://www.mysite.com/home/

On the current site the content links look like:

http://www.mysite.com/100/article/categoryname/1182/

On the new site they will be:

http://www.mysite.com/home/2009/12/article-title-here/

I tested a 301 redirect in the .htacess file, it worked but the problem is when it loaded the new page it had the url like:

http://www.mysite.com/home/2009/12/article-title-here/?cat=categoryname&id=1182&pagenumber=

Is there anyone who can give me some advice on how best to handle this?

2

WordPress has it’s own internal rewrite engine so that might be conflicting with your redirect.

If you can post your redirect - you might get a better answer…

Note that there is a WordPress forum here, but this also could fall under Apache…

3

Hi,

I wasn’t quite sure where the problem was arising…if it was the old CMS, Wordpress, server issue etc so I just took a gamble and posted here :slight_smile:

Here is an example of a single static page from that site. This is what the redirect looks like

redirect 301 /100/category/Contact http://www.mysite.com/home/contact/

When I click on the old contact page it takes me to the new one but the url in the address bar now looks like:

http://www.mysite.com/home/contact/?page=Contact
4

I heard that for 301 redirect it’s a 20-30% PR loss, do someone have any details?

5

There is a slight loss of page rank every time you 301 redirect a page (this is to avoid ‘infinite loops’), although I’m not sure it’s as much as that.

But if the URLs are changing, you don’t have a lot of choice in the matter - you can either do a 301 redirect and take a small PR loss, or you can offer no redirect and haemorrhage ranking position as Google gets a slew of 404 errors across your site.

A single 301 redirect on each page is not going to make a huge difference. PR is only one of about 200 factors that Google uses to determine a page’s position in the search rankings, so a slight drop to one of those factors is going to have minimal impact.

6

Can anybody tell me how to do 301 Redirect for aspx pages. I searched a lot for this but isn’t worked for me.

7

ASP Redirect
<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=“301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,“http://www.new-url.com/”
%>

ASP .NET Redirect
<script runat=“server”>
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(“Location”,“http://www.new-url.com”);
}
</script>

Hope this will help.