I was wondering if anyone can give me any recommendations as to what my options are here. I have a link list site that is produced dynamically. The site has been around for 8 years and gets traffic from google, yahoo and others. The script that produces the dynamic pages has the option to change the site over to run static but if I do this all my dynamic pages that are currently indexed by search engines will be 404. I really need to change to static because running dynamic URLs is causing problems with server load and also producing duplicate URLs. How can I switch my program to run static URLs but not loose the current dynamic URL search traffic? I have read about Mod_rewrite but I'm not sure this will do what i'm looking to do? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
I can't speak with authority here, but I thought I heard that using 301 redirects (page moved permanently) would address your issue. You'd still need to have the dynamic pages going for a little while to "announce" the 302, but you could eventually pull the plug. Are you making good money from all of those rankings? If so, have you considered just buying more server resources somewhere?