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

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>

 

 

Thursday, March 12 2009   |   Tagged as: , , ,   |   Peter Viola   |   Comments

How do I get into search engines faster?

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

 

Wednesday, March 11 2009   |   Tagged as:   |   Peter Viola   |   Comments

How to fix being banned by 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

Friday, March 06 2009   |   Tagged as:   |   Peter Viola   |   Comments

Vista 64-Bit with 4GB RAM Boot Issues

Have you tried to run Vista 64-bit with more than 4GB RAM?

I worked with Dell support for 2 weeks to get my new XPS 720 QX6700 quad-core PC to recognize more than 3GB RAM and it would BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) each time Vista x64 started to load. Dell even sent me a new motherboard for my 2 week old PC. Then they said my U360 SCSI hard drive was the issue so I yanked it out and baselined a new SATA drive and got the same BSOD results.

Finally a Dell technician found this Microsoft Patch and it solved the problem.

 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=91672C7C-614B-404C-850C-377541E93C18&displaylang=en

I even tested by uninstalling the patch and the BSOD returned as soon as I rebooted. I am finally able to use my SCSI hard drive with Vista x64 and 6GB RAM.

Thanks to Dell for all their help.

 

Thursday, September 06 2007   |   Peter Viola   |   Comments

Microsoft WPF/E Silverlight Released

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

Tuesday, April 17 2007   |   Tagged as:   |   Peter Viola   |   Comments

Enable IIS 7 on Vista

Did you know Windows Vista has IIS 7? Watch Brett Hill of Microsoft show you how easy it is to enable IIS 7 on Vista.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=206237

Thursday, April 05 2007   |   Tagged as:   |   Peter Viola   |   Comments

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