Am I doing this redirect right?

Hi

I am installing a bunch of new pages on my site, and a abandoning the old page names. I have deleted the old files, and I'm building up the .htaccess to do a permanent redirect.

My question is: Am I doing this right???

My .htaccess looks like this, and I am going to add about 10 more lines of redirect:



Do I need the full path for the target page? They are on the same domain!!

Any advice appreciated!
thanks, Dave

Yep, the full URL is always required for the second target page.

Gringo.

Ok, I put a redirect for each (relevant) page which points to the new corresponding page. Works fine!

Also, I put a nice 40 page with a 'file not found' type of error, but also the full navbar and linkset so it will easily lead to the regular page.

Anything else I can do to make the transition smooth for Google? Should I allow put a 'nocache' meta tag in my 404 so that spiders follow it, but not index it?

thanks again for all your help, everyone
d

If you've got a 301 redirect, you won't need anything else, at least not for Google. If you like you could exclude all the old pages from being spidered with robots.txt, but I honestly believe that if a search engine doesn't follow a 301 properly, its robot will be unlikely to obey a robots.txt either.

Gringo.

What about the 404? I know that when I see custom 404's in the Google results, it seems unprofessional to me.