Ok I’ve been doing web design for quite some time but haven’t ever needed to do 301 redirect a site before…I have someone who took over a company and also changed the company name so the entire website and domain name has changed. I need to 301 redirect the old site to the new. I know I could just throw an ASP or PHP 301 redirect BUT the problem is that the files are HTML. Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose if I changed all the file names to .ASPX and then redirected them to the new site? All the new .ASPX pages would be seen as new (or worse duplicate) content form google! How in the world am I supposed to 301 redirect html pages? Thanks for any help guys Seriously.

You can configure the server to parse .html files as PHP (or ASP) or you can use .htaccess to do the redirection (on an apache server).

.htaccess would probably be the easiest way since you can just create one rule to redirect every page:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^old-site.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://new-site.com/$1 [R=301]

The above should (didn't test it) redirect every request from your old site to the corresponding page on the new site. For example old-site.com/somepage.html will be redirected to new-site.com/somepage.html

Matt, ASP/ASPX pages do not run on Apache so a .htaccess solution is of no use at all.

The principle is correct though, you can make .htm(l) files run as ASP or ASP.net if you have access to the IIS MMC or via a control panel such as Plesk.

Also Search engines have for several years now treated the meta refresh element as a redirect header.
A meta refresh of 0 seconds is treated as a permamanent redirect (301) and one second upwards as a temporary redirect (302/307).

I addition Google also treats the canonical meta element as a permanent redirect.

My mistake. I wasn't sure if the OP was using apache or not. Looking back I should have assumed it was IIS since you can run PHP on either.

IIS Has similar canonical redirect capabilities to Apache. Read this:

http://knowledge.freshpromo.ca/seo-t...p#canonicaliis

Your config would look something like this:

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
      <rules>
        <rule name="Redirect HTML to ASPX" stopProcessing="true">
          <match url="(.*)\.html" />
          <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.mydomain.com/{R:1}.aspx"
               redirectType="Permanent" />
        </rule>
      </rules>
    </rewrite>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Provided the rewrite module is installed yes, but unless you have server access or a host that will or has installed it you are back to quare one.

Holy #$(% that sounds difficult. I might rel=canonical those bad boys unless you guys think thats a horrible idea, haha.