Forum Moderators: phranque
There were 4 thumbnail pages and about 50 full photo pages + about 20 new pages I created for the new site.
I used the following html to do this on both the thumbnail and full photo pages on the established site.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Left Hand Widgets</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2; URL=http://www.widgetgallery.co.uk/left-widget.htm">
<meta http-equiv="status" content="301 Moved Permanently">
<meta http-equiv="location" content="http://www.widgetgallery.co.uk/left-widget.htm">
</head>
<h1>Widgets: Left Handed</h1>
Sorry these photo(s) are now on the <a href="http://www.widgetgallery.co.uk/left-widget.htm>Widget Gallery: Left Widget page</a>.
You should be re-directed in two seconds.
<p>
Or return to the <a href="index.htm">Widget home page</a>.
</body>
</html>
After doning this I found something on webmasterworld about orphaned pages being undesirable.
Its done now but I am worried that the links on the original site to the full page photos are orphaned. Should I do anything about this?
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2; URL=http://www.example.co.uk/left-widget.htm">
<meta http-equiv="status" content="301 Moved Permanently">
<meta http-equiv="location" content="http://www.example.co.uk/left-widget.htm">
The first thing to note is that you cannot set a 301 Permanent redirect with meta tags - the above will do a meta refresh to the new page, but the status/location metas are ineffectual and simply incorrect. You must set the redirects server-side, either via a .htaccess or via scripting.
You should fix all the links on the old site to point directly to the new URLs.
I did blunder and manage to shut the site down for a few minutes with type 500 errors too :-)
I checked today and saw all the 301 redirects in the logs.
Curious trivia probably but before I made that change the slurp spider did generate a 301 in the file stats logs from the meta tag entry, that was the only one though: -
lj601255.inktomisearch.com - - [23/Jul/2006:03:31:06 +0100] "GET /2003/ HTTP/1.0" 200 739 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; [help.yahoo.com...] www.example.co.uk
lj601255.inktomisearch.com - - [23/Jul/2006:03:31:06 +0100] "GET /2003 HTTP/1.0" 301 234 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; [help.yahoo.com...] www.example.co.uk
