Updating existing site, but what about google's cahce

[ajfish]

Team,
I am working away on updating our site (from version 4 to version 7) and the look and feel will be different as well as many sections and product titles. When I get around to uploading the updated site to my existing location, what is the best way of dealing with those pages (version 4) which are already there? I don't really want to remove them all, since those pages cached by google which are still being used by people, will no longer be there and those potential customers will be lost since they will get the "page not found" message.
I thought of writing some bat file which would list all the pages on the site currently, and copy a htm file with the same name for each and every file existing (prior to the 7 upload), this page merely giving a link to the new version 7 site. These pages could be left there until google cached the new site and all its associated files.
Any other bright ideas.

Andrew

[pinbrook]

see http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articl...1-redirect.htm

this will show you how to create a .htaccess file that will redirect from your old pages to your new ones, in a search engine friendly way

[Bob Isaac]

see http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articl...1-redirect.htm

this will show you how to create a .htaccess file that will redirect from your old pages to your new ones, in a search engine friendly way

Interesting, so I tried it on our Cobalt RaQ550 and it didn't work. I have just moved a bunch of pdf files from mydomain/dir1/dir2/ to mydomain/dir3/

[ajfish]

Okay, I can access a .htaccess file, but of course I will have to find out which files will be superseded and which are not, the latter will have to have an entry in the .htaccess file to point to a unique equivalent page on the new site. Quite a lengthy process with well over 100 pages of htm files to administer. Better get my scripting hat on, unless you can think of any other ways of achieving this.

Andrew

[Jacques]

Hello Andrew,

Just doing the same thing as you do (upgrading from V4 to V7).
In order not to loose our good ranking in Google and to avoid the page cache problem I'm taking one page at a time in V7 and giving it the name of the corresponding page in V4 (in the "Section detail" window, there is a "Page name" field in the "Layout" pannel where you can give any html name to your page).

It's tedious but it works

Best regards,

Jacques

[pinbrook]

Whilst Jacques method works, it is nice to have control over page names which you can in V7 but didn't in V4.

Instead of renaming all v7 pages why not use a 301 redirect, to do this you create a file with old page names and new page names, so the old redirects to the new.

This is just as tedious a method as renaming all the pages, but at least gives you freedom over page names

[Jacques]

Hello Jo,

Yes that should work too but it's still tedious

[eAbsinthe.com]

Just a quick note for the hard of thinking (and I include myself in that), you need to delete the old file for it to work.