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

March 12, 2009

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>