I have a site that I have had about a year and a half and when I first started 1and1 told me in order to have more than on ASP.NET site on the same shared account that I would have to put a redirect in and point each domain to a separate folder. ex. mydomain.com redirects to mydomain.com/foldername/default.aspx Which I put up with for a long time because they are cheap and at the time I didn't know any better. I now have a dedicated server and can do whatever I want. My question is now that I have about 25,000 pages indexed in Google and if I try to get rid of all of those pages with 301 redirects ("301 Moved Permanently") and just redirect them to mydomain.com/filename.aspx is Google going to give me duplicate content penalties? Is this going to kill me with the serps? If I have not explained this well - I do apologize Any incite would be appreciated
You don't need to make a seperate 301 redirect for each URL, if your keeping the same URL structure you can just 301 redirect the actual domain name and attach the "any variable" behind it, that will pass over all URLs. You will notice a loss in search results, but only for a short period of time, that amount of time is different for every site.
Just make sure your content is not duplicated at any stage of the transfer as you will loose your google ranking.
That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The 301 redirect (in plain conversation anyway) is the server equivilent of "I've moved two blocks down the street; make a turn at the left and stop next to the house across the street from the park." In other words, it forwards the user (including search engine spiders) from the old page to the new one. The search engines will pick that up PDQ so there'll be no need to check for a duplicate content penalty - ESPECIALLY given how often per day their indexes tend to be updated with new content (as old content gets filtered out).
The Search engine will transfer the existing value of your domain to the new one. The page rank will be slightly hampered but still you will manage to retain the same or better pagerank if you do not make any changes to the existing content. Let the search spiders recognize the NEW URL first, then you can experiment with your content.