Eventually, you will need to know that the old pages that are already cached by Search Engines such as Google among others has a value over the new coming webpages. For this reason, there are two different was to redirect the old web pages to the new ones.
1. By Permanent 301 Redirection:
Permanent 301 Redirection method is more advisable one than the meta redirect. This can be easily done through .htaccess on the Apache server whereas on IIS server it is a different process altogether.
Here are the most common Redirects:
- URLs ending in /index.php or /index.html to the root of a website (/). Then this is the code:
RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ .*/index.html\
HTTPRewriteRule ^(.*)index.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]
- The most common code for non www to www is:
RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.RewriteRule (.*)
http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
2. By using Meta Redirect: This method is implemented by using the following tag on the header portion of a page that is set for redirection:
meta equiv="refresh" content = "0; url=/new-page.html"
My favourite icon - Aaron Wall on his SEOBook blog replied to a post saying that "If people are dumb enough to not test their redirects after setting them up, and then not notice they redirected their site to another, then they deserve to fail IMHO.
It is smart to use oneself as an example from a branding standpoint, which is why we did it here".
