Herself’s Webtools

I am moving the old website into 7 new websites, then revamping the old one. So as I’m copying old pages from the website I’m redirecting them to the new site. Search engines really hate it when you move pages. Best to keep as much intact as you possibly can. ( see Cool URIs don’t change )

If you must move pages than the best way to do this is  and not upset the search engines is to edit your .htaccess file in your website root directory. You just add lines at the end or create a new file and start at the top.

redirect 301 /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://www.newwebsite/newfile.html

Be sure to put one and only one space between each item.

Test and then test again before deleting the old files. Also make sure your web browser is not delivering a cached copy. I spent the better part of an hour trying to fix some re-directs that weren’t broken. The browser was just serving up the cached copy of the file.

There are other ways to do this with scripts and html in each file. But those methods were heavily used by spammers and may get your search engine ranking dropped if you use them.