Dropped Like a Bad Habit !!!

[TampaTech]

I am interested to see if there is any magic behind migrating from a non-OsC site to an OsC site with the Ultimate SEO URLs v2.1 contrib and maintaining your search engine rankings (as best as possible) !!

 

I was under the impression that if redirect rules were set up in the root .htaccess file to map the old site's indexed URLs to the new site's URLs, then the drop in rankings would be minimized.

 

HOWEVER, I did this and saw my Google rankings drop off the face of the Earth.

 

In my .htaccess, I have the following:

Redirect /oldsiteurl.html http://www.newsite.com/newsiteurl-i-9.html

 

Questions:

1) Can anything can done immediately to help get my rankings back up? I did a "site:www.mysite.com" and when through all of the indexed pages and made sure they were redirected to the new site. I did find about 15 pages out of 110 that were not redirected in my .htaccess file. When I clicked on the indexed URL, I got a 404 error. This may have killed me, but I am not sure.

2) In the future, what should I do differently?

[radders]

Shouldn't that be 'redirect permanent'?

[TampaTech]

I made the switch to the new site about 4 weeks ago using just "redirect". When I saw that I was dropped from Google (about 8 days ago), I changed them to "redirect permanent". I am still waiting to see if that helps.

 

I am not sure if changing from "redirect" to "redirect permanent" will help the situation, or if it is already too late. I would like to hear from anyone that was able to migrate to a new site and maitain their rankings in the search engines (most notably Google). Please share your tips.

 

Thanks radders for the info.

 

Shouldn't that be 'redirect permanent'?