Old story, Profitable Web business 5 years, our outsourced company was shutting down, wanted to upgrade to PHP, Hired new company, Promised not to lose all our existing links, went live first 3 months lost 75% of our business, FIRED them $#@! Joined DP. And started turned things around ourselves. 3 month later got all controls back from $#@! We now see, at least 10,000 visitors a week are getting error pages when using links set up over the years. The single largest is the www.BLA BLA BLA.com/index.asp We now have PHP on a Linux server, and the hosting company is not supplying any help, there has to be a redirect. We can not be the first with this problem?
Is the 301 redirect and Mod_rewrite you speal about from OSC ultimate SEO or do you have another source, I need a road map and instructions on how to do this I am losing $1k a day THANKS
If you are using apache, you can setup the config or htaccess file with 301's formatted like this: redirect 301 /oldpage.asp /newpage.php A good option as well is to create your custom 404 page that can intelligently redirect. For instance, if a person gets there looking for "blah.asp," the file can check if (file_exists("blah.php")) and forward the person if it does. If it doesn't exist, you can search the directory based on the filename without the extension to look for something relevant or you could run your own site search to find the most likely result. If this issue is causing that kind of monetary loss, you should just hire a competent developer to check your logs and create redirects. It's an easy process.
A properly executed 301 redirect will also tell the search engines to change the URL in their index. This way, you should retain the traffic and the 404s will stop once all of the URLs have been updated in the search eingines. That process can take 6 months of more.