mass redirects advice!?

[inertia]

Orite guys. We have been approached by a sound archive site with 32,000 pages listed in Google's index, mostly on one URL but with several smaller URLs as well. These pages do really well and rank highly for plenty of terms - getting them 30,000 hits a month.

The company would now like to move their full catalogue and site(s) from their current, archaic database system on to a new CMS system, provided by another company. The other company approached us for advice on how to set this up without damaging positions, traffic etc. Originally they were going to 301 ALL the existing pages on ALL the URLs to a brand new CMS domain where all their business and time would then be concentrated.

Having looked through each site i recommended that they keep the primary domain and transfer that into a CMS system trying their hardest to preserve URLs thus keeping the high PR and trust which they have already established. I then recommended they redirect all the smaller URLs to this main domain.

Firstly, is this the best advice?

Secondly i have a technical question about re-directs. What is the best way to redirect a large amount of pages? I have worked with htacess but i am still in my infancy of using mod rewrite. Can anyone tell me if there is a way to re-direct a whole directory / sub-directory or does each individual URL need its own redirect?

If i haven't explained myself correctly then please ask me for further info.

Peace out!

[wige]

Sounds like that is the best advice, keeping as many of the well performing and established URLs intact, and redirecting only as necessary.

The redirections shouldn't be too difficult, especially if you are using Apache, which I assume you are, since you mention mod_rewrite. I am also assuming that you are using this to 301 redirect old URLs to new ones, rather than doing internal rewriting of URLs. If that is the case, you can redirect entire directories without using mod_rewrite. You can use the RedirectMatch directive instead.

To change from yourdomain.com/some/old/file.html to yourdomain.com/some/new/file.html, you would use:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/some/old/(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/some/new/$1

And if you are going to be deleting anything, for example removing a directory that is not going to be available at a new location, you can use the same method to mark it with 410 Gone.
RedirectMatch 410 ^/some/deleted/directory/(.*)$

[incrediblehelp]

Sound advice from wige as usual.

[kruser]

Inerta,

When you refer to a new CMS system do you mean a system that writes directly to a file, rather than one that writes to a database.

[inertia]

Originally Posted by wige

And if you are going to be deleting anything, for example removing a directory that is not going to be available at a new location, you can use the same method to mark it with 410 Gone.
RedirectMatch 410 ^/some/deleted/directory/(.*)$

Cheers for that. With directories/urls that dont have an obvious redirect would you redirect them to the home page anyway?

[wige]

Originally Posted by inertia

With directories/urls that dont have an obvious redirect would you redirect them to the home page anyway?

I have taken two different approaches, with different sites. Generally speaking, my experience has been that sending the user to the home page when they are trying to find something specific is less than ideal. The user will frequently leave immediately, or browse around the site a few pages in an apparent attempt to find what they came for, then leave.

One approach I have done is the 410 Gone, which was effective for a technical site that had content that was often in flux. I find that this approach worked very well for sites that have temporary content, limited time sales for example, because the search engine would drop the page quite quickly. These pages also rarely generated many links relevant to the rest of the site. I would also implement a customized error page so that visitors that had bookmarked the page about the special offer would see an appropriate message ("Sorry, this sale/special offer has ended. To see our current special offers, click here") that would take them to the correct or current funnel. I did this by creating a custom error 404 page in PHP for the /specials/ folder, using the header("HTTP/1.1 410 Gone"); command.

The other approach I have used is to 301 redirect users to an internal, error aware search engine. I do this on my main site because we sometimes get products that are temporary, and this method lets me keep any link juice that is gained from deleted content, and the search page is able to use the query string to determine that an error message should be shown and what product the user was originally looking for, and also show the user related items from the current inventory so that the user has a reason to remain on the site. Using the 301 redirects also keeps the page ranking for a short time, and if there are enough inbound links this could cause the search page showing similar products to become indexed.

[inertia]

Cheers Wige, plenty of food for thought there.