A couple of months ago we basically scrapped our website and redesigned it. Now I notice today that one of the pages from the old site is starting to rank well. This page is very similar to one we have on our new site only the new page has more current information. How can I get the traffic from this old page over to the new page? Should we do some sort of a re-direct? Is there a way to get our new page into this ranking spot?

Thanks

Hi there,

Yup. You need to redirect and thankfully Yahoo's got its act together there now.

You need to do 301 server side redirects. There are two types of redirects; client side (controlled by your browser) and server side (controlled by the server where the web page lives) and search engines prefer server side.

There are two types of server side redirects; temporary (which issue a 302 header response) and permanent (which issue a 301 header) and search engines prefer the latter if, indeed, this is a permanent redirect. You can issue the 301 either through server side script (PHP, ASP, etc) or by configuring your web browser to say so for each URL you want redirected.

It may be worth noting that Yahoo are I believe unique in considering meta refreshes to be 302s if of less than 5 seconds and 301s if more than 5 seconds.