I have been working towards making my sites fully active served. This allows me the flexibility to do lots of interesting things I have been wanting to do for some time. For example in paper airplanes I would like to serve people adverts from different advertisers depending on the number of pages they have seen on my site. In cocktail recipes I want to make amazon recommends style recommendations when someone visits an individual cocktail.
A major limiting factor was the fact that although I had replaced all the links on my sites to point at the new active pages the old html pages were still drawing a lot of traffic from people linking to my site and legacy search engine results.
For some time now I have been wondering how to do 301 redirects since I understood they could overcome just this kind of problem in a way meta redirects cannot. It turns out that when you have a linux server you can place a “.htaccess” file in your directory which will permanently redirect traffic arriving at an old URL to the new URL you want accessed.
I worried of course that the new URLs would underperform in the search engines and I would lose all my traffic but today (less than a week after making this 301 redirect change) the entirely new URL www.paperairplanes.co.uk/planes.php is listed in Google Sitemaps as being the highest page rank page on my website and I have seen no reduction in search engine traffic to the site from any engine following the changes.
Good encouraging news for anyone who wants to change the URL structure of their site but not lose existing traffic in doing so.
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