Old URL's... 301 redirects?

Hi there,

I've got a few questions:

1. I have made a site like a year ago and all pages had their names in a form I didn't like (there are backlinks). Anyway, I'm about to change the URL's to SEO acceptable URLs and want to know what to do with these old pages? Delete them? Or should I do the 301 redirect?

2. How to do a 301 redirect? Say, my old page is called www.site.com/stupidpagename.html and I want it to redirect to my new page which is called www.site.com/nicepagename.html. What should I do? What code to insert into .htaccess?

Thank you very much in advance,
dmi

 

Definitely do 301s. Both for SEO reasons and to keep any traffic that might go to those pages.

As to how you do it. That depends on if they are all HTML pages or PHP, asp etc. also depends on the hosting server.

HTML is the hardest on a windows server, linux has httAccess (or something like that) that can rewrite the urls

 

Thanks for your answer.

The hosting is Linux, they are HTML pages.

 

htaccess is the easiest

 

I know that, but how do I do it? What is the code I have to insert?

 

Use this code in your .htaccess file. Replace example.com and /oldpage.html /newpage.html with the paths to your site.

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html

Code (markup):

If you don't know how to make one, use this: http://www.htaccesseditor.com/en.shtml

 

I figured it out. Thanks Dan.

 

You're welcome. Enjoy the rest of your vacation.

 

(OT) What is this "vacation" thing you speak of?

 

Look in his signature.

 

sig says he's on vacation