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[nycphp-talk] [OT] migrating old site to cleaner URLs

Marc Antony Vose suzerain at suzerain.com
Wed Jun 27 04:43:15 EDT 2007


Hi there:

I have an old site that has been online for ~7 years, and it is  
established, if a bit old and crusty.  It's a database-driven  
directory of products for the Mac, and it performs reasonably well in  
google's search results, and gets a fair amount of traffic.

This site was built before I even had a framework, so it's all  
cobbled together, and I'm just now finally building it out to what I  
always wanted it to be, while simultaneously moving it to my clean 
(er) framework. So, the question is this...

My URLs are all something like www.xyz.com/trigger/0/1/4.  I think at  
the time I just wanted them to be short.

Now that I'm rebuilding it, I have different needs, because the site  
will be structured a bit differently in order to list products for  
more platforms. I would like to have www.xyz.com/product/1234/ 
platform/567.  Still short, but makes more sense.

Thing is, the site does receive a great deal of its traffic from  
google, and who knows how many bazillion links there are pointing to  
various pieces of the site, so I need to implement an intelligent way  
to parse the old URLs into the new ones.

But that's not the hard part; the part I am worried about is losing  
the search weighting I've built up over the years.  I've read that  
google ignores 302 redirection codes and doesn't update its index, so  
I'm a bit at a loss as how to proceed.

Anyway, wondering if someone could give me advice or share a real- 
world example of what they have done in the past.

Cheers,

Marc Vose
http://www.suzerain.com



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