Moving pages to a new site

You may have moved a whole set of pages to bi.org, or just reorganised how your pages are structured, but if the URLs have changed, you'll probably want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to find the new location.

When moving pages

Copy all pages over the the new address, check them all for correct links, etc.
Put in a domain-redirection message on the *new* pages (see http://bi.org/php/ to how this can be done). Basically, if someone has been redirected from your old pages then they will get a message reminded them to update their links.
Update all the old pages so that links between your pages take you to the new location, not another old page.
Put a notice on all the old pages telling people the new URL to visit.
Update all the search engines with the new URL.
Search with AltaVista for pages linking to your old URL, and email the owners asking them to update. In AltaVista, type link:oldurl into their search engine for a list of sites that link to the old address.

... wait a month or so ...

Update all your old pages with simple page that tells people to go to the new URL and nothing else. Put in a meta redirect tag to take them there automatically after 10 seconds. See http://bi.org/~purple/01.html for an example of this.

... wait a month or so ...

Close down your old account, but ask them to put in a http redirect so that visitors still going to the old URL will get auto moved to the new URL. They should do this without charge because they won't have people emailing them asking where your old pages have gone ;-)

The beauty of the php redirection script is that the annoying "these pages are now at http://xxxx" messages only appear if visitors come in via the old address. It really bugs me to see "URL changed to" messages when I've gone straight to the correct address.

Go to Backups of WWW pages or Index