301 Redirects of our Existing site to New AC 7 Site

DonAshby · Post by **DonAshby** » Mon Nov 05, 2007 7:26 pm

We are hoping to get the new AC 7 site ready to go this month, but we have our existing old site that is Google Ranked. So we need to 301 permanent redirect all our product pages ( about 1500 ) to the new AC 7 product pages that have a different ( URL Friendly Format ).

What is the best way to do that? We assume we need to put a cross reference file on the new site ( which will take the old domain name ) so that the old

http://www.goinginstyle.com/gis/body_in ... pf_id=2254

now reads in a URL Friendly Format

URL removed:

We thought about keeping our old server up, writing a script that will have the old list and the new list and do 1 redirect directly to the new product page. Anyone have any ideas... I assume that everyone needs to deal with this?

The Site Map Feeds might help - they need to be done for google, ask, yahoo, and msn. But that won't transfer the earned Page Ranks according to my conversations with Google people as the Search Engine Trade Show - they said do a 301 redirect.

DonAshby · Post by **DonAshby** » Mon Nov 05, 2007 7:59 pm

Additional info:

I think the New SEO friendly ULR format will look like this:

http://www.goinginstyle.com/gis/Pacsafe ... Money+Belt+ w/Wire/P2554.aspx

The name of the product and the Product Item Number will be in the URL. We need the old URL to point to this.

Post by **Shopping Cart Admin** » Mon Nov 05, 2007 8:07 pm

Hello Don,

This really should be an AbleCommerce feature, I'm sure someone has mentioned it before. I'll check on some ideas.

DonAshby · Post by **DonAshby** » Mon Nov 05, 2007 8:24 pm

The straightforward ( but clumsy brute force approach ) is to just build a file on the new server and when someone comes in from a google or yahoo existing link - it would read the file on the new site and 310 redirect to the new and correct page. But that would be potentially 1000s of lookups and could bog down the server. Also 2 redirects is bad - it needs to be limited to 1 time. So that is why we thought we would write a program ( as the URLs look similar ) to look at the pfid - product file id - and point it directly to the new URL on the AC Platform.

Looking forward to ideas.

Don

Post by **Shopping Cart Admin** » Mon Nov 05, 2007 8:35 pm

Hello Don,

If you kept the SKU's the same, then it could be possible to do this programmically without much work so long as you have a database with the old sku's and product ID's.

Since your category pages are 'named' it would require isapi rewrite or something similar to pull off.

Watch for incoming '.asp' URL's with pf_id in the string. eg 2254

Query old database to look up pf_id's (2254) SKU.

Query new database by SKU to lookup, Product_ID.

send 301 re-direct.

DonAshby · Post by **DonAshby** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 7:27 pm

We looked into this some more and it looks like we need to do an ISAPI page to page rewrite. Microsoft IIS is more complicated on 301 redirects than others.

Is anyone else trying to move an existing site with lots of products that is working this issue?

Don

Post by **Shopping Cart Admin** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 7:32 pm

Hello,

http://www.helicontech.com/isapi_rewrite/

Moving site location
This is very usual problem when you move web site from one domain name to another, or just another folder. You want to redirect all requests from one web site to another preserving the requested resource name and parameters. This is incredibly useful especially when you want to preserve page ranks of existing pages and external links. The solution is to use ISAPI_Rewrite on the old web server:

NC Software · Post by **NC Software** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 7:52 pm

http://sitedirector.nc-software.com

Post by **Shopping Cart Admin** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 7:58 pm

Hello Neal,

I know a lot of our customers are using site director, I didn't know if it would be easy to handle a lot of re-directs without spelling each one out one by one?

NC Software · Post by **NC Software** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 8:05 pm

Nope, various options for wildcards or a single "one line entry" to handle the needs. Full documentation is available online as well as a free download.

http://help.nc-software.com/sitedirector