[Sigia-l] handling transitions to new site architectures?

[Richard Wiggins]

There's a wrinkle on the idea of redirecting popular URLs.  Why not redirect
ALL the URLs from the old site? To do this, you set up a smart Error 404
handler.  You keep the old site hierarchy alive, and the error handler just
checks the old path to see if it would've worked on the old site, and serves
up an the page.

Here's an example.  Follow this link:

http://olin.msu.edu/allclin.html

That's to the old version of a university health center.  A script wakes up
and find the old page -- and even adds a little text flagging the content as
potentially obsolete -- and then serves up the page:

http://olin.msu.edu/oldsite/oldsite.php?old=allclin.html

We're about to transition the main Web presence of a large midwestern
university to a new site, and we're doing the "soft launch" approach as well
as a smart error 404 handler.  There will be ZERO link rot the day the new
site goes live.  Eventually we'll turn on the Error 404 status code so
spiders remove the stale URLs from their indexes.

You could take this approach and still put in redirects for really popular
pages.

There are other little tricks you can do in an Error 404 handler.  Here's
some instructions and free code for Apache or IIS servers:

http://search.msu.edu/help/providers/errorhandler/

/rich




On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 00:03:15 +1000, Eric Scheid wrote:

> 
> *   set up redirects for the top popular URLs of the old site
>     to appropriate pages on the new site. use the magic of
>     power-laws to zero in on the top pages
> 
> *   insert a "new site is coming" page in the old site,
>     complete with a "contact us" form
> 
...
> 
> *   make sure your 404 page actually says something useful
> 

____________________________________________________
Richard Wiggins
Writing, Speaking, and Consulting on Internet Topics
rich at richardwiggins.com       www.richardwiggins.com