The change of software in my last post meant that not only the domain, but all the page names and the entire structure of my recipe site changed — a big no-no for search engine purposes! On the other hand, the traffic this application gets isn’t actually worth anything to me in monetary terms — quite the opposite, it just uses bandwidth ;-) — so I wasn’t hugely bothered if it lost rank in Google for a while. In fact it was a golden opportunity to test the best way of handling this situation.

I started off by buying a brand new domain name, setting up MovableType, importing all the data, fixing up the design, and testing it to see that it all worked OK. At this stage it was a secret from Google. Once I was happy, I wondered just how I was going to keep all that precious traffic to the old site. I didn’t want to devote a huge amount of time to it, so I decided I’d just use 301 redirects (this is a header sent by the web server that tells the page requester that the page has “moved permanently”; there is also a “temporary redirect” status).

Thank goodness for dynamic pages! The old system used a single page called ShowRecipe.asp which took the id of the recipe and displayed it. So I just recoded this page to take the id, look up the recipe title, and convert it into the new URL (MovableType uses “search-friendly” URLs constructed from the recipe title). Then it does a 301 redirect to the URL on the new site. I removed / renamed the few other pages on the old site.

I added the new site to my Google webmaster tools page and monitored the results. Google came and spidered a few pages from the site within a couple of days, and I was soon seeing almost the level of traffic I’d had on the old site. Within a week there were 23 pages in Google’s index, which seemed not bad for a brand-new domain registered less than a fortnight before and with no incoming links yet, apart from our own site. As of now, Google has spidered again and picked up over 140 pages.

The process is evidently not finished yet though, as old redirected pages are still showing high up in Google (#6 for “pitta bread recipe” for example). Of course if anyone clicks on those results, they will automatically end up on the new site anyway, because of the redirect.

I’m probably not going to bother going after links to the old site and asking people to change them, but I would if this was a commercial site. Otherwise old linked-to pages seem to hang around in Google forever.

So at present just doing the 301 redirect looks as if it is going to work pretty well. If you completely change the structure of your site it’s well worth doing a specific 301 redirect for every page I think, for the benefit of human visitors rather than search engines.