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SportsGuy
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Joined: Aug 30, 2002
# Posts: 3600
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Posted: 2005-Nov-10 14:17
Cool with me. I haven't worked for the last 9 months to hit the SB now.
OK, so my plan with 301ing was to be the following:
domain.com 301 to www.domain.com (that's what started this whole thing) - in the .htaccess file
The current site on shared hosting has a dedicated IP address. The site when moved to the VDS will have a dedicated IP addy, as well, though it will change from the current IP obviously.
Domain, folder & files are all staying the same, so, should I just continue to host a pages at that old IP address and 301 them all to the corresponding page on the new IP?
...or is changin IP addy's not a real concern to this?
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g1smd
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Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10418
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Posted: 2005-Nov-10 14:20
While you are working on the new site in the background on the new server, keep the domain name running at the old server until all the work is done to the new site on the new server, then just point the DNS at the new server.
The site then keeps the old domain name, and after about a week you can take down the old server. Change of IP is irrelevant. You're keeping the same domain name, and that is how sites are accessed.
Yes, the 301 redirect from non-www to www on the new server is important. That needs to be there from right at the beginning.
Lizardz supplied a sample .htaccess file earlier in this thread that has about 99% of what you will need to put in yours.
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SportsGuy
Staff
Joined: Aug 30, 2002
# Posts: 3600
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Posted: 2005-Nov-10 15:10
Perfect. 
I plan to leave the "old" site up for about a month after the "new" one is live (it's the billing period) - the DNS switch will be the last thing done, AFTER the new version is built, tweaked, checked, tested and mulled on for a bit.
The .htaccess file will be a nice Sunday morning coffee thing sometime in the next couple of weeks. I'm going to take my time with this to learn this stuff as I go and make sure I do it right the first time.
Since the site is already live & indexed, I have the time.
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g1smd
Staff
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10418
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Posted: 2005-Nov-10 15:24
>> Since the site is already live & indexed, I have the time. <<
You sure do, and a couple of months of paying for two servers is chicken feed in the overall plan (always makes me laugh when a site goes offline for two weeks for a "redesign" - they could set up Apache on a spare (Win98 or above) PC in the office to test new designs if necessary).
I am also going to recommend you also take this opportunity to get rid of all <font> tags from the pages, and make sure you build the pages from the logical block elements: headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, and forms, wherever possible. Then you can put all the styles in one external stylesheet. This saves your bandwidth, makes it easier for the pages to be spidered and allows site-wide minor design changes to be actioned in minutes.
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SportsGuy
Staff
Joined: Aug 30, 2002
# Posts: 3600
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Posted: 2005-Nov-10 15:47
I am also going to recommend you also take this opportunity to get rid of all <font> tags from the pages, and make sure you build the pages from the logical block elements: headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, and forms, wherever possible. Then you can put all the styles in one external stylesheet. This saves your bandwidth, makes it easier for the pages to be spidered and allows site-wide minor design changes to be actioned in minutes.
Excellent idea - any idea where there might be some basic tutorials on how to do this kind of thing? I've wnated to do it, but until now, hadn't taken the time to fully understand it. Should really be quite simple given the site is simple:
~ heading
~ paragraphs of content
next page...more of the same style...
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lizardz
Joined: Nov 12, 2004
# Posts: 1394
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Posted: 2005-Nov-10 18:40
sportsguy, you can solve the .asp problem with another simple rewrite, this would be the second one:
RewriteRule (.*).asp $1.htm [R=301,L]
I believe that will do it.
All pages will be rewrittin to a neutral .htm extension.
I don't like using .php or .asp extensions, I'd rather use regular old html or htm, it looks normal, and you can process the pages with whatever you want in the future and it will always be the same.
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g1smd
Staff
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10418
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Posted: 2005-Nov-10 18:53
I recommend that you keep all the page names and extensions the same on the new site so that you do not need to change any linking at all...
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lizardz
Joined: Nov 12, 2004
# Posts: 1394
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Posted: 2005-Nov-10 20:01
I've done the above, it works great, I didn't like the directory/navigation/file naming structure of a site I inherited, so I redid everything, all at once, about the same size site as sportsguy has, it was great, the search engines didn't even blink.
Since everything is 301'ed, you don't lose any backlinks, everything gets respidered, and, as a bonus, google sees all new, changed pages.
Yahoo especially liked this, we started ranking for some really ridiculous search terms after the rewrite.
That was also a full html rewrite of course, which is what the search engines especially love.
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SportsGuy
Staff
Joined: Aug 30, 2002
# Posts: 3600
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Posted: 2005-Nov-11 12:34
Darn near forgot about this.
Right now a lot of the pages in this site are contructed using the undescore. Will changing these to hyphens, in effect, change the names?
Perhaps I should make the change and 301 all those affected for 45 days or so...
Thoughts?
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lizardz
Joined: Nov 12, 2004
# Posts: 1394
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Posted: 2005-Nov-11 20:23
sportsguy, we're almost doing the same site rebuild, the one I redid, with phh extensions, random use of - or _ separators, everything, no folders, blah blah, I said to myself, who cares, fix it all at once, 301 everything.
Here's a secret, with a few well done rewrite rules, you can totally rewrite every page on the site, _ to -, .asp to .htm, and anything else, within reason.
The more consistent your naming conventions were on the site, the easier it is to implement the rewrites.
Then you will have a near perfect thing, the bots will not blink if you do it right. Doing that successfully is sort of fun, it's a challenge, and has little room for error, but as long as it's all tested thoroughly before going live it's not a problem. Once it works it works.
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SportsGuy
Staff
Joined: Aug 30, 2002
# Posts: 3600
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Posted: 2005-Nov-11 22:41
Thanks for the hope, Liz. I'm in that spot where time is not an issue unless I think it's an issue. In reality, the site's live and indexed now. Not doing all that hot-$hit in G, but it'll come.
Now is the time to tackle all this housekeeping stuff, learn some new skills myself and make it better,s tronger, faster...LOL
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