New version of website

kato77 · Feb 22nd, 2008, 09:25

Hi,

Apologies if this is in the wrong forum, I guess what I'm about to ask falls in between the .Net and SEO forums.

I've been rebuilding my old ASP site in .Net and will be ready to copy it live in a couple of weeks. In addition to cleaning up a lot of the markup etc. I've also streamlined the site a bit so some of the old content doesn't exist on the new site. To avoid losing any search engine positioning I have, I can redirect the old versions of the pages to the new pages meaning any backlinks will still work (I assume that's correct??). However what should I do with pages that aren't on the new site - is it my responsibility to ensure that links on other sites actually have a page to go to?

I guess another alternative which I'm loathed to do is redirect every page on the old site to the homepage of the new site but obviously this will mean that people using the old links will be taken to pages they're not trying to get to. Any help on this would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Rob · Feb 22nd, 2008, 10:01

I would keep the old pages there as a shell. they need to be there so that within them you can issue a 301 redirect to the new location.

kato77 · Feb 22nd, 2008, 11:05

Hi Rob,

Thanks for your quick response.

I understand that I should keep the old versions of pages to redirect to their new counterparts but what about old pages that don't exist on the new site - I obviously can't just redirect them. Do I just leave them there and never do anything with them?

Thanks

Rob · Feb 22nd, 2008, 11:46

Are you going from one domain to another?

kato77 · Feb 22nd, 2008, 13:42

No, same domain but the URL's will differ on the new site. So,

the old site may have had this URL:
http://www.websitename.com/Content.asp?P=1

and the new site may have the rewritten version at
http://www.websitename.com/AboutUs.aspx

..which is easy enough to redirect obviously. It's the pages that don't have new versions I'm concerned about. I guess they could happily sit there still but not sure if that's the right way to go....

Rob · Feb 22nd, 2008, 14:16

You could 301 redirect all pages without a new verison to the homepage -they will quickly get dropped from indexes, and PR will still remain within the site.