Google - 301 Re-Direct Quandry - Help!

[E-Senses]

Originally Posted by OldWelshGuy

But when you switch hosting make shure you leave the old site up at the old address until googlebot is no longer visiting, else it will harm your rankings badly.

Thanks so much for your reply OWG!

Just one last thing to confirm that we will be doing things right. I just want to make sure that your answer is vaild in the scenario in which the domain is still the same. So the hosting will be different, but the domain it will be still the same.

Example:
old url: www[dot]mysite[dot]/products/item3
new url: www[dot]mysite[dot]/products/a435

If it is valid your answer in this scenario, then would you mind explaining why googlebot would still inisist on accessing the old hosting when the domain is pointing to the new hosting?

Again thank you very much for your answer!

[OldWelshGuy]

the old url's and new urls are completely different lookign at that. you should however be able to sort out a 301 redirect match (assuming there is a structure to both old and new sites.

With regard googlebot accessing the old hosting, this is where the difference between the internet, and the world wide web naming system come into force. WE use domain names for the world wide web (WWW), which the DNS servers then translate into IP addresses on the internet. Googlebot on the other hand, spiders by IP adress and location . So while the DNS servers might be updated for the www locations, the IP adresses will still be in databases on datacentres across the network. because of this, googlebot will keep hitting both the old and the new servers.

If it hits your old IP and finds your site gone, you just lost some trust factor from google. So by leaving it at the old and new locations, you get a nice smooth transition with no loss of trust from Google.

[BenjArriola]

Considering your case E-senses, I would use some type of algorithmic redirect instead of mapping out each old URL you find indexed or has a backlink.

Depending on the server-side language you have, the code will be different. Since I am more of a PHP guy, for your situation having this:

old url: www[dot]mysite[dot]/products/item3
new url: www[dot]mysite[dot]/products/a435

That would simply be something like:

<?php
  if(str_pos($_SERVER[REQUEST_URI],"/products/") === 0){
    $productCode = explode("/",$_SERVER[REQUEST_URI]);

    // Create a database of all old URLs and new URLs
    // if that does not exist yet. If it can be drawn from 
    // the same database, then good.
    // Input the old code in $productCode[2]
    // And spit out the new one and assign to a variable like
    // $newProductCode

    header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
    header("Location: http://www.mysite.com/products/".$newProductCode);
    exit();
  }
?>

If you are using some other language, there should be some counterpart to this. If you are not a programmer by heart and has a hard time interpreting this. Find someone that can do this for you. If you have all old URLs in some archived format, text file, csv, Excel, or even the old site exist as saved static pages, I am sure there is a way to extract all of the old information and map it out to the new one and create smart 301 redirects so you can already forget about it once it's done.

Originally Posted by E-Senses

Thanks so much for your reply OWG!

Just one last thing to confirm that we will be doing things right. I just want to make sure that your answer is vaild in the scenario in which the domain is still the same. So the hosting will be different, but the domain it will be still the same.

Example:
old url: www[dot]mysite[dot]/products/item3
new url: www[dot]mysite[dot]/products/a435

If it is valid your answer in this scenario, then would you mind explaining why googlebot would still inisist on accessing the old hosting when the domain is pointing to the new hosting?

Again thank you very much for your answer!

[E-Senses]

Thank you very much BejArriola and OWG! You have helped us find the correct path to follow!