Question on 301 Redirection

[chadseo]

I'm in the planning phase for a change we're going to make on our site. We use xqASP, and the urls right now are very long, http://www.example.com/xq/asp/param1.1234/qx/somepage.htm I'm hoping to change these over to http://www.example.com/keyword/1234_keyword2.htm. As I see it, there will be three phases to this transition:

1) Setup the url rewrite for /keyword/1234_keyword2.htm to provide the correct page to the user. This will not involve 301 or 302 redirection, and should be transparent to the user.
2) Change the links on the site to point to the new, shorter url, instead of the old one.
3) Setup 301 redirection from the old URLs to the new ones, so that the search engine's can transfer the information (PageRank, history, etc.) of those pages to the new ones.

My question is, does it matter on which order I do #2 and #3. For instance, if we do step 2 then step 3, and the site is then crawled, then the SE will see the new URL's as completely new, and add them to the database. When it tries the old links, and gets redirected to the new ones, will it update the information for the new url with the information from the old url? Or should we do the redirection first, so that the new URL comes from the redirect on the old one, and the information will definitely get transferred? Or does it matter at all?

I hope this makes senes, and thanks in advance for any help.

[seomike]

Change the urls in the links then set up the 301's at the same time. ;)

When the site is recrawled it will pick up the new urls any bots that visit the old urls will be 301 obviously to the new urls and then the old urls will be pushed to the supplimental results. Try and kill all linking in the site and off the site to the old urls to help the engines know that those pages no longer exist. Yahoo for example is slow to pick up on old pages.

[chadseo]

Mike,

Thanks for the feedback. I'm new to SEO, and this is my first major change, so I'm trying to make sure I go about it the right way.

[cupid]

I've never done such redirects- what happens when outside sites still link to old pages? do the SE count such links toward the new ones?

thanx in advance

[seomike]

If outside sites link to a page that is old it will keep that page in their cache as still live. If a search engine encounters a 301 to a new page then you're good. the old page will eventually die out and the new one will be noted. As per ranking the old page though yahoo and msn are slower than google at getting the old stuff out of the SERPS.

[jorock]

I put a 301 from domainname.com to www.domainname.com about 3 weeks ago and the toolbar went grey, didn't see any update this weekend either.

It had PR before the 301, and now it's grey, anyone else experience this?

[krisval]

It had PR before the 301, and now it's grey, anyone else experience this?

Finally just added some redirects this past month after being scared to death about doing it wrong based on a bad 302 error in the past. I changed www. mydomain.com/topic/page.html to www. mydomain.com/newtopic/page.html. I could not see any benefits of capturing page rank, etc. I needed to make the changes any way.

Also redirected an old site like your example and I am unable to determine if there was any PR passed. Doesn't look that way, but Google doesn't show all backlinks so I can't be sure.

I, Brian had some comments that may be of benefit in this forum. He didn't think he got any benefit as well. Don't know if this answers your question.

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4054

[jorock]

This case may be different...

It was the same site, just indexed without the www.
Both versions, domainname.com and www.domainname.com had pagerank, I just wanted to use the one url with the www.

When I put up the redirect, the toolbar went grey.

It's still indexed, no rankings change, just a grey toolbar.

[krisval]

Your case does sound different. I am not a 301 expert. As a matter of fact I was very concerned about doing it right because I flubbed it up a long time ago and got a site delisted for a while until I removed it and jumped through hoops.

I suggest that you spell out exactly how you did the 301. Did you use .htaccess or some other method, etc. and see if a tech person in this post can help you out.

One other thing. If you remove the redirect does the orginal page still have the page rank?

[jorock]

The redirect is on Windows, I used the control panel to do it. I did a permanent redirect.
The server responds with 301 headers, so I think it worked fine.

Most pages have been indexed under the the new "www" version.

I haven't tried reversing the redirect to see if the pagerank comes back.

I checked the future pagerank tool, and it shows pagerank across all the datacenters, just not on any of my toolbars. I see a grey bar.

I did this 3 weeks ago, maybe it just takes time, but I've done this before and never lost pagerank.

[krisval]

I checked the future pagerank tool, and it shows pagerank across all the datacenters, just not on any of my toolbars. I see a grey bar.

This may just be a toolbar issue on your PC. Try uninstalling it, then reinstalling it to see if the PR comes back. The good news is that your site is still indexed and the datacenters show PR.

[jorock]

This may just be a toolbar issue on your PC. Try uninstalling it, then reinstalling it to see if the PR comes back. The good news is that your site is still indexed and the datacenters show PR.

Thanks, this worked. ;)