Need some advice for site migration

I have a site with a PR of 7. We want to move our site onto a new platform which would change the urls of all the products and links pointing to the site would of course not work.

What would be the best way to keep my PR ?

If i did a 301 to the new site would the new site become a 7/10 shortly after or is this a BIG risk ?

I heard url mapping is frowned upon by google as well.

Let me ask you some questions

1. Are you changing the domain name?
2. What is the purpose of changing the platform?
3. What type of server are you on (Linux or IIS)

1. Keeping the domain the same
2. Changing the whole CMS/Ecommerce Platform
3. Current Server is Linux and moving it to IIS

In your situation the homepage PR will most likely not change as it is the domains page rank. It really depends how much of the pr is coming from internal sources or being fed directly to your homepage.

You should do 301's on a page per page basis. i.e. redirect each product to its new page home on the new server.

Not sure what version of IIS you are getting but try and get IIS7. IIS7 allows you to utilize the web.config much the same way as an htaccess on linux. This makes for much easier time of implementing 301 redirects on a per page basis. earlier versions of IIs require much more "on server" scripts to do this effectively for a dynamic site.

All in All if you properly implement the 301's on a page by page basis that is the safest way to go. You may lose some ranks for internal pages but I would think your homepage would be unaffected as long as its content doesn't change too much.


Is the scripting language changing in the new CMS? i.e. from PHP to .NET?

Thanks for the reply.


Isn't what your saying URL mapping ? I heard its frowned upon by google.

Current site is in PHP .. new site will be in .NET.

URL Mapping refers to a server side technology of translating url's paths into file system paths. This is always done, no matter what URL is called. htaccess, web.config are all executed on the server.

It only matters to Google what header is returned. Google is looking for a 200 OK. When you move a page you want to tell Google and all other browsers which visit the old URL "I have moved permanently to this location, look for me here next time"

that is what the 301 header does. You can use many methods to do this, all that matters is that Google receives the correct information.

If you 301 the page it will transfer most link and anchor benefit.

Now having said that, if you were to use some technology such as URL Mapping to return a page which delivers a 200 OK header but actually redirect the visitor to a different page then that is frowned upon.

Since you are using .NET you can use URL Mapping, or web.config or whatever just make sure that when you check the old url it gives a 301 redirect and the new page gives a 200 OK.

There is a header checker on the homepage here at seochat.com

301 redirection is a good one to migrate the domain name or to change the urls of your site.But I dont know about the domain names.If it is in php means change it with some of the features in php only rather than changing the domain names.If you want to change the domain name means then have a clarity and start migrating your sites.

I understood 301 permanent redirect is a good option. But our current problem is that we have to migrate the website to a new dedicated server, and change the domain name server. In this case the old URLs will not exist anymore, therefore I can't use 301 to redirect visitor from old url to new url.

Can you suggest if there is any way to transfer the page rank of the old pages to the new pages?