I'm about to redesign one of my sites from the ground up. The new pages will have the same meta tags and content as the old ones, same domain - but different urls. I have about 40 ranking pages that I'll need to redirect. To keep my SEO, is it as simple as using a big list of 301s in my htaccess file? e.g. Redirect 301 /oldsite/bla1.html http://www.domain.com/newsite/new_bla1.html Redirect 301 /oldsite/bla2.html http://www.domain.com/newsite/new_bla2.html Code (markup): How long should I leave this in place?
Yes it is. I always use cPanel to create the redirect so I can not say for sure that your syntax above is correct. I can check if no one else confirms it. You may see a temporary drop in SE but it will come right back. Keep them up until all the new pages are indexed and NONE of the old ones are. This may take longer than you expect. MSN still has a couple of my pages that I changed 11 months ago. It is also a good plan to do a custom 404 at this time in case you miss a page somewhere. On that 404 provide as many site links to your new pages as you can.
There was a discussion about that, here, sometime back. As I recall the answer was yes but 40-50 was no where near the number that would cause a problem.
If you have the option of using dynamic pages, there is an alternative option. It goes like this: Create a custom 404 that parses the request header to figure out which page was requested. If the request is in the list of moved pages, do the appropriate 301, if not do the 404. Then, remove the old pages to cause the custom 404 page to get invoked. This way the server only uses extra cpu cycles when one of the old pages is requested and not for every request.