Maintaining seo when converting asp db driven site to actinic

[magpie]

Can anyone offer a work around for converting a db driven (asp) site to actinic, particularly with maintaining seo in mind.ie page re-naming / re pointing ?

[leehack]

All actinic pages apart from the home page sit in the same folder ('acatalog' unless you change the name in V9). So you could setup identical page names in actinic with identical content and direct all asp pages to that folder.

[magpie]

Thanks Lee ... we are a 2 site business and defintely actinic users and not specialists and not especially IT savvy, so apologies for the daft queston but ... how would you go about directing the asp pages to the actinic html pages. Is this a DIY possible or do you think we would need external help ? There are about 1500 product pages.

[RuralWeb]

My view is that what you are trying to do will be almost impossible as you will not be able to replicate the file names correctly. Post the urls of the two sites

[leehack]

Thanks Lee ... we are a 2 site business and defintely actinic users and not specialists and not especially IT savvy, so apologies for the daft queston but ... how would you go about directing the asp pages to the actinic html pages. Is this a DIY possible or do you think we would need external help ? There are about 1500 product pages.

With 1500 pages you are going to need a global setting enabled in htaccess that changes them all automatically (if possible) and sends them off to the correct destination, doing it manually is just not viable IMO. Without seeing some example URLs of what you will need to change, it's hard to say for sure, but with actinic you can have .asp page names, however if yours is ASP.net (.aspx) then you will almost certainly have a very difficult way ahead.

Provide the URL of your top 5 pages you'd need to keep, we can probably give you a definite from that info then. If they are dynamic URLs you might be struggling, if not, it might be possible.

You don't necessarily need an expert, but you will need to do a few hours learning on the net. Typical things such as '.htaccess' and '301 Redirect' are what you will need to thoroughly understand.

[RuralWeb]

The other thing to consider is that if you try and replicate your current page file names you will be loosing one of the main advantages of converting to actinic ie static keyword rich file names.

As always if you do the same as your current site you will get the same seo results - so what's the point of converting to actinic?

Tell us why you want to convert to actinic and what are your aims. I have done this in the past and many times it's just easier to make a clean break in order to gain in the long run.

[magpie]

With 1500 pages you are going to need a global setting enabled in htaccess that changes them all automatically (if possible) and sends them off to the correct destination, doing it manually is just not viable IMO. Without seeing some example URLs of what you will need to change, it's hard to say for sure, but with actinic you can have .asp page names, however if yours is ASP.net (.aspx) then you will almost certainly have a very difficult way ahead.

Provide the URL of your top 5 pages you'd need to keep, we can probably give you a definite from that info then. If they are dynamic URLs you might be struggling, if not, it might be possible.

You don't necessarily need an expert, but you will need to do a few hours learning on the net. Typical things such as '.htaccess' and '301 Redirect' are what you will need to thoroughly understand.

Thanks Lee .... will take your advice and have a bit of a self learning session first. Sounds messy ... the reason we want to convert it to actinic is that we are aquiring a new related business that is asp (not aspx) driven. Our existing business is actinic driven and the format we are most familiar with going forward. in terms of self managing the site and all the back office stuff.

[chris ashdown]

Just wondering how many levels from the home page would really effect google.

That is if you created the same page names accross for the Home page (including direct links) and the first level, plus a good site map, would you site be seriously effected in seo?