My 4 year old ecommerce site is being redesigned using new software. Therefore, all of my product & category pages (excluding homepage) will have new/different URL's (this will be an improvement from an SEO perspective). Many of my pages have excellent search engine rankings. How do I let the search engines know that the new URL's are the same pages as the old URL's which will be going away and, thus, not lose my rankings?
Use a 301 redirect on each page that is going away and point it at the new version of that page. Make sure you use a 301 'permanent' and not a 302 'temporary' redirect.
Does the 301 Redirect have to be added for each page individually...I have over 2500 URL's! How do you do a 301 Redirect?
yes each page should get its own redirect for best results. What is your site? What kind of platform are you on? IIS, Apache, etc..?
I recently did the same, i had to move a pr3 site i had changed almost everything.. including domain. But supriseingly the new site got indexed in like 5 days after i put up the redirect. Hopefully page rank is transferd i dont think it will but if even some of it is itll be good..
From the Search Engine Optimization FAQ over at SitePoint.com... Bear in mind the example given in the FAQ deals with redirecting .html based pages to .php based pages, but the concept remains the same.
Of course it will, but in the meantime the site owner would have a bunch of broken URLs which means no PageRank being passed along (not to mention losing SERP positions as well). A 301 redirect helps take care of that.