404 errors galore

[KJ-Rodgers]

We have a DNN site that we recently rebranded. The old site was almost ten years old and now that we have a brand new site, a lot of random urls are coming up as errors. While we went through and created 301's for our top sites, we still have site popping up from Google's cache.

What is the general recommendation? There are way too many sites to 301, mostly because of how DNN writes the urls. Should I let them be and wait for the SE's clear them out? Or is there a way to have Google clear the cache of this domain and start fresh?

[StalkerB]

So, it's the same domain but new site structure/underlying CMS which has different URLs? I don't quite understand how you have multiple sites, vs multiple pages, but that's because I'm reasonably unfamiliar with DNN. Or am I wrong and you've consolidated multiple domains under a new URL?

Assuming 1 to 1 mapping of redirects is out, are there any opportunities to map folders? As in anything under site/folder/pages is mapped to the new site/new-folder? It's not ideal but gets them one step closer.

Alternatively you should make a very good 404 page explaining why they've ended up there, give them suggestions for top pages and a search function to find what they want. Bounce rate will still probably be quite high.

You can request removal of URLs through WMT or also tell them about a change of domain, but I'm a little unclear as to what you've actually done.

[kdaly100]

You should be able to write your .htaccess to cope with generic paths and URLs There are tons of good sites out there on how to write a good .htaccess and to be honest it is time and effort to wade through the site and get it back in shape.  I have been there and feel your pain.

[KJ-Rodgers]

Sorry for the wording, it is one domain, with multiple old pages.  I have created 301's for our former top pages, submitted new site maps and are implementing a new adword campaign as the company name has changed, but the domain is the same. We are in the process of creating a good 404 page.

The domain has stayed the same, but the way DNN would write URLS, I would have example domain.com/somefolder/tabid/34543/somepage/-&?EX/eample.aspx.

Today we have implemented a way to cut this jargon down, but this is the stuff we are 301'ing. Most of those pages didn't do that well, but the others we have taken care of did and we want up the speed.

[KJ-Rodgers]

I will look into this. I have little knowledge on htaccess and had my developer do most of the major 301's through the ISS. Not sure, but I know I will catch my self up to speed. DNN is a beast with this stuff.

[StalkerB]

Do you mean IIS? (again I'm unsure, you might mean exactly what you say :D)

If you're on a windows server IIS is the equivilent of .htaccess on a Linux server, so you'd have to apply the rules using that, but same principle.

[StalkerB]

As per the comment below, is it possible to create a rule that would rewrite the URLs to match the new ones, following perhaps the same rules that you're using to cut down on the URLs?

So a formulaic rewrite rather than doing them all manually.

[KJ-Rodgers]

Yes, DNN is a windows based CMS and runs on a windows server. I know we have ISS 7, but I am fairly new to DNN as well and it takes more of developer mindset to get around in it.  I will look, into it, but we cannont do a 1-1 redirct for most and am not sure about a rule to cover the rest.

You guys rock, btw.

[StalkerB]

Pretty sure you mean IIS now

Speak to your server side guy, he might be able to come up with a rule.

If not, you could start here - http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/461/creating-rewrite-rules-for-the-url-rewrite-module/ - and be prepared for some of the most torturous learings of your life

In the meantime I would still probably make a nice 404 page helping those get to the page they want.

[RyanPurkey]

It sounds like your best bet is going to be digging up some analytics from your old site, finding common URL patterns, and redirecting them more thoroughly via rewrite rules.  A clever use of sorting in a spreadsheet can make this task go by much quicker, and if you have some key pages on the new site where you feel entire clusters of old pages can redirect that will help too as you're not redirecting one to one.  It would also help to tag the new site's applicable pages with rel=canonical. Lastly, you can apply a nocache tag to the pages on your old site, althugh they should be flushing out fairly soon. Those are the general recs.  There is a certain amount of time involved in the process, and it's not a strict number of days/hours/minutes.

Oh, for your 404 page (http://www.structural.net/;flkajhsdlfg) I'd recommend making it a lot more functional, especially since you're expecting a lot of 404 traffic in this current process.  Check out Apple's for an example (http://www.apple.com/lkjsfdawe) and this blog post for more ideas: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/personalizing-your-404-error-pages (an oldie, but goodie.)