[thelist] Redirection technique?

[Joshua Olson]

Bob,

There are quite a few things that you may need to technically consider to do
what you need.  Some of the items are much more difficult than others.

> - Moving and reorganizing a site of about 750 pages.

Moving is easy... ZIP and FTP will do what you need, most likely.
Reorganizing will require more effort.  I recommend looking at the newly
proposed sitemap and making a directory structure that logically matches
that sitemap, at least at the top-most tiers.  The new sitemap may need to
be negotiated between you and the client before investing in actual
rearranging of the files.  If you are not already using includes to bring in
the design template, I'd highly recommend that you use this as an
opportunity to do so.

750 pages may seem like quite a few pages to process and you may be hoping
for an automated solution.  Depending on how the pages were constructed in
the first place this may or may not be possible.  If the pages were
generated by only a few authors or authoring tools you may find patterns in
the coding that you can exploit in some sort of Regex Search and Replace.
If the pages are "all over the place" (c)(tm) you may be out of luck and be
forced to process each page manually.

With 750 pages (which isn't really that many) manual transformations may be
the ideal solution anyway since it'll give you a good chance to clean up
ugly code and make it fully compliant with whatever (X)HTML standard you
promised the client.

> - Not a direct mappng of www.x.com/x.html to www.y.com/x.html.

Ok... a lookup table of old URLs to new URLs should work for most
situations.

> - Many individual page urls will change.
> - Must be invisible to user.
> - Must be Google friendly. (301 Permanently Moved)

URL rewriting may provide the simplest solution.  You could use it to
rewrite the requests to the old pages to the new pages (and thusly avoid the
301 altogether) or rewrite the request to the old pages to a single 301
proxy page that will redirect based on the URL.

Google will have no issues with either solution.  Solution 1 is easier to
implement but solution 2 provides a more permanent solution where Google's
references will eventually be updated.

> - Must not require changing original page.html to some other file type
(.asp, .php)
> - IIS hosting.

In IIS you can map any extension to any scripting engine.


Hopefully everything I mentioned above is within your current experiences.
If not, this may be one place where hiring an experienced web professional
may help you compress the timeline significantly and possibly save you many
person-hours of labor.  By web professional I'm not talking about a visual
designer per se, but rather someone that has a solid understanding of
programming, problem solving, server technologies, and project planning.

Good luck with this project,

<><><><><><><><><><>
Joshua Olson
Web Application Engineer
WAE Tech Inc.
http://www.waetech.com
706.210.0168