A friend had his site redone that I did for him many years ago. The old site used static URLs with meaningful file names. The new site? Dynamic URls with meaningful querystrings. The old site had pages/filenames dating back to the late 90s. So yes they dropped the old for the new, and even worse the old site's URLs are being 404 redirected to the new site's home page! The new site has been live for about 5 weeks now. I think for the moment the old site should be restored and the new one redesigned/modified to do SEF URLs and included all the old ones. Another option is to do 301 redirects on those old URLs to the appropriate new URLs. What is your opinion/advice? Thanks in advance
I think you would be better off using mod-rewrites to make the urls the same as the original website. After you setup the mod-rewrites, resubmit your sitemap to Google. It may also help to get more new backlinks to get your pages reindexed quicker.
Thanks for your responses. Which would be better: 1. Restoring the old site immediately and then redesigning the new site to incorporate static urls 2. Do 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new site, keeping the dynamic urls in place. Anything else will take quite a bit of time. Keep in mind I am not working on this so how quickly and well it gets done depends on others. The two choices about should be relatively quick fixes...
You're already in trouble and mine as well do the 301 redirects and wait it out. It may take a couple of months to get listings back, but you'll most likely have to continue doing SEO to get back where you were before the change.
Well keep in mind their old pages are still ranking. I think restoring their old site might salvage things for them
If that is the case then you might be able to salvage things and save yourselves some rankings, but that's not what you said originally:
Well the old pages are being 404ed, but they still rank! Do I do a 301 redirect or restore the old site and SEF the new site with the same URLs ?