Migrating a site 301

[marlattts]

This post is deleted!

[customerparadigm.com]

Rich -

Congrats on (almost) launching a new website.

If all of the pages don't match up completely, I'd recommend against a rewirte rule like the first example, and instead use a series of 301 redirects in your .htaccess file.

In my humble opinion, if you have less than 500 pages of content that needs to be redirected, and not everything is just moving from www.domain1.com/page1.html --> www.domain2.com/page1.html  (but page names, categories, etc are different), then just list out each page like:

Redirect 301 /before_after_anterior_cosmetics.php http://www.atlasdentistry.com/before-after.php

... and so on and so forth.

I'm making this recommendation for two reasons:
1. You can test each and every line easily, using a system like the redirect tracking tool, http://httpstatus.io/.

2. You can make sure that you don't have "multiple" 301 redirect loops going on, which can happen with dynamic rewrites.  If you have multiple chains of 301 redirects, you will lose about 15% of the search value per redirect, according to Distinguished Google Engineer, Matt Cutts.

This page discusses how Matt Cutts of Google shows that after a few 301 hops, Google may give up crawling:
http://www.mktdojo.com/matt-cutts-discusses-301-redirect-limits/

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff

[marlattts]

Thanks Jeff.

Is there a best practice for URLs when doing 301s?

Example:

Www.domain.com/services/index.php

Www.domain.com/services/

www.domain.com/services

[customerparadigm.com]

Rich -

Google and other search engines will consider each of these pages different and unique:

Www.domain.com/services/index.php

Www.domain.com/services/

www.domain.com/services

… so, you should create a redirect rule for each to go to the new page.

Ideally, you should have a rel=canonical tag in place, so you don't get dinged for duplicate content.

But if you have an external link pointing to /services/index.php and another link pointing to /services/ and a third link pointing to /services  … then you'll need three 301 redirects.  But redirect them ALL to one page.  Of the three, /services/ is probably the better choice, but that's a personal opinion, and one that's based on what actually shows up on your site.

Here's how to redirect all three pages to one common page:

Redirect 301 /services/index.php http://www.atlasdentistry.com/services/
Redirect 301 /services/ http://www.atlasdentistry.com/services/
Redirect 301 /services  http://www.atlasdentistry.com/services

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff