Deploy New Website without losing Search Engine Rankings

Everyone goes through this at some point. You are rebuilding your web site, using a new platform, new programming language and new navigational structure. This creates new URL's and new extensions to filenames. In releasing this new web site, all your previous search engine listing will now result in 404 page not found errors.

Whaddya do?

If you are hosting on an Apache server, there is this cool configuration file named .htaccess which can give directives to the server for handling everything from hotlinking to error handling and more.

This can also be used to handle redirects. What can save your SEO is finding all your important existing pages, and, using .htaccess, redirect them with a 301 redirect (which means it's a permanent move) from the old file to the new file.

redirect 301 /old/old.asp http://www.you.com/new.aspx

The above will send the visitor seamlessly to the new file and tell the browser or crawler, that this is a permanent move.

On IIS servers there are most certainly ASAPI filters that can handle this same situation, though I can't point to any for sure. On other platforms you can just as well keep the existing files and make them only contain header redirects as well.