How do I move a page without losing search engine traffic?

Thursday, March 12

Let's say you have lot of Classic ASP pages or HTML pages on your site that are bringing in good search engine traffic but now you want to redesign your site using ASP.NET. What do you do so you don't lose your established traffic with the new design?

In the HTTP protocol you would use a 301 redirect. Keep the old page name in place but edit the file using the following syntax. In time the search engine will have the new page indexed:

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.xyz.com/newpage.html">
</head>
<body>
This page has moved to <a href="http://www.xyz.com/newpage.html">http://xyz.com/newpage.html</a>
</body>
</html>

If you want to move some Classic ASP pages you can use the following:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "/newpage.asp"
%>

If you want to move some .Net pages you can use the following:

<%@ Page Language="C#"%>
<script runat="server">
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently" ;
Response.AddHeader( "Location" ,"/newpage.aspx" );
}

</script>

Tagged as: asp-net, classic-asp, iis, search-engines

How do I get into search engines faster?

Wednesday, March 11

posted by Peter Viola

So you've redesigned your site but the pages haven't been found by search engines yet. What can you do to help speed up the process?

You should be using a sitemap: http://www.sitemaps.org. A sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site so that the site can be more accurately crawled by search engines. Here is an example file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

Even better news is that you can specify the sitemap in your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

Google, Microsoft Live, and Ask.com allow you to add your sitemaps using their Webmasters Tools site:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

http://webmaster.live.com/

Add a site to Ask.com http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http//www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

Adding a site the site the traditional way still works but can take more time:

Add a site to Yahoo http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

Add a site to Google http://www.google.com/addurl/

Add a site to DMOZ http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

Tagged as: search-engines

How to fix being banned by Google

Friday, March 6

posted by Peter Viola

As a managed Windows hosting provider, we take interest in online security and site validation. Here’s a little tip when dealing with a banned site on Google.

You've probably seen Google's search warnings about 'This site may harm your computer' when website content has been compromised.

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=45449

Naturally you know not to visit that site. What do you do when you are the site owner and you've fixed your compromised content?

Rather than waiting for Google to figure out that your site has been fixed you can use Google's free Webmaster Tools site you can alert them it's been fixed.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/hey-google-i-no-longer-have-badware.html

Interested in managed Windows hosting? We’d love to talk with you about our Windows cloud server hosting, or our dedicated Windows hosting. Call us at 1-888-313-9421, or email at sales@orcsweb.com.

Tagged as: search-engines

Microsoft WPF/E Silverlight Released

Tuesday, April 17

posted by Peter Viola

Hey. Check out http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

It's the new name for WPF/E. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web.

Peter

Tagged as: wpf-e-silverlight