I realize this is probably better suited to a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) board, but I wonder if any of the dopers might have the general gist of it.
As part of a new website project, I discovered that my organization has a large number of old and outdated pages on an old domain, myorg.org. Although most of our current content has been created for or moved to myorgnewsite.org, many of the myorg.org is available for purchase - Sedo.com still have favorable page rank for their respective keywords, in many cases superior to their counterparts in myorgnewsite.org. I have used the Meta REDIRECT method of redirecting one or two pages to a new site before, but I am worried about doing this for 50 plus pages at one time, from the perspective of this looking like a spam technique to the search engine spiders, and potentially affecting the page rank of myorgnewsite.org. Just to be clear, I don’t care about the page rank of the old pages going away, but I am worried that the page rank of the new site will be negatively affected.
1.) Is this something I need to worry about for this many pages, or is it no big deal?
2.) I don’t manage the webserver that this stuff is hosted on, and while I know a bit about doing it the correct way from a Linux webserver running Apache, The pages in question are on a windows server so the Apache htaccess method of doing a 301 redirect will not work. Is there a windows equivalent? If I have to ask the server administrator to do anything unusual, I would like to at least sound like I know what I’m talking about.
Yes, you can definitely do this on a Windows server. Google “Windows” “301 redirect” for tons of info.
And I have been instructed to set up such redirects (on a client’s site) by an actual, paid SEO firm that I trust knows their shit, and it involved more than 50 pages, so you should be ok on that front.
Sorry, I wrote that this AM before I had my coffee. I should have said Meta “Refresh” not REDIRECT.
I looked at an old redirect page real quickly and copied the wrong part, REDIRECT was the <title> of the page which was redirected using Meta Refresh.
We have access to the pages themselves, but not the server directly. So I could not change anything on the server myself, but I could change all the old pages to redirect using the refresh method of redirecting, placing something like <meta http-equiv=“REFRESH” content=“o; url=http://www.myorgnewsite.org”> in the header. Then the pages would just redirect without having to bother the server administrator, so this would be the easiest method, just writing that to the header of all the pages with find/replace or as a batch.
But then we would have 50 or so pages with all that content all pointing to the same place and I’m worried that this could look bad on myorgnewsite’s part from a search engine perspective.
Doing a server-side redirect (301), if you can do it is better because it will move the ranking by telling the search engines this page has moved, where doing the meta refresh could look suspect.
For the server administrator doing a global redirect should be less than a 10 second fix even on windows (although apache is easier with the .htaccess files).
As an added benefit, the admin could also redirect pages to their equivalents if the files have the same name very very easily - eg.)
With the server-side method, eventually the admin will be able to retire the old server, because all the old links on search engines will point to the new server, which will mean one less server to update, check on, and take care of - which means less work for the admin in the long run.