Orbit26
Posts: 4

Hi - I am redesigning an ecommerce website that was originally done in .asp, and am building it in .php

I have some questions about search engines:

How to handle links to the old site? Can I redirect users to specific pages, or just redirect them to the index?

The site has a good search engine ranking, will that be completely lost when the new site goes live?

Also, if anyone has some really good search engine resources out there, I'd appreciate them

Thanks,
Christine

Joe Gillespie
Posts: 528

orbit26 said:
Hi - I am redesigning an ecommerce website that was originally done in .asp, and am building it in .php

I have some questions about search engines:

How to handle links to the old site? Can I redirect users to specific pages, or just redirect them to the index?

Yes, you can redirect to specific pages using a meta tag

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.sitename.com/pagename.html>

The site has a good search engine ranking, will that be completely lost when the new site goes live?

If the actual filenames change, there will be a short term loss of ranking. If you can keep the home page filename as index.html, that should be okay but Google reindexes sites about once a month and should pick up the new pages then.

Also, if anyone has some really good search engine resources out there, I'd appreciate them.

The two most important factors for getting a high ranking (on Google anyway) are link popularity and good semantic markup of meaningful content. Digging deeper, the quality of the links to your site are important too. By that, I mean links from sites that have high rankings themselves. The surefire ways to get a low ranking are to use splash pages, especially ones built in Flash or with little or no text or to use frames. Frames make it very difficult for search engines.