I've a live website where I have created manually around 300 .html pages in notepad, 3 years back. Now I want to get it converted to drupal.

Since website is ranked well in search engines I'm worried about the SEO rankings after I get it converted to durpal.

The main problem is that my old .html page will be changed. So, I have to redirect the old urls to new urls permanently and notify search engines about the changes; this way I could still keep my pages ranked well in search engines.

Is there a module which can do this job or I've to manually configure 300 html pages in .htaccess file?

Comments

yelvington’s picture

Just set the path for each page when you create it in Drupal. Leave .htaccess alone.

sparkguitar05’s picture

There's a module called Path Redirect that does exactly what you want.
http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect

You can also do what the person above me said to do if you don't mind all your URLs ending in .html

himagarwal’s picture

since the file names will be changed i think i have to use the redirect module..........
can this module do the same as I require --> http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect ?

sparkguitar05’s picture

Global redirect is a module for SEO. It is also a great module to have and I highly recommend you enable it on your site. Without getting into too many details, it will remove the possibility of search engines punishing you for having duplicate content on your site. It's kinda hard to explain.

The Path Redirect is the module you will need to redirect the URLs on your old site to the URLs on your new site.

himagarwal’s picture

I was hasting in using global redirect but as per your say I'll use both global redirect and path redirect.
Just curious to know if path redirect will add automatically redirected urls to .htaccess files? How does it work?
Thanks "sparkguitar05" for chords and leads.
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I just installed the global redirect but I didn't see any link for its setting in /admin. And I think it's not working...

I've a url alias /node/5 for /about but when I type /node/5 it still doesn't redirect to /about page.?? What is worng? Can't URL redirect and global redirect work together???

sparkguitar05’s picture

Global redirect does not have any admin settings. All you have to do is install it. And yes, they do work together.

Global redirect removes duplicate content by making only one URL for each node. For example, let's say you had an about page. All of the following URLs would lead to the same page.

/node/5
/node/5/
/about
/about/

A search engine might see that an punish your website for having 4 duplicates of every piece of content. By installing global redirect, any of those URLs will redirect to /about.

Now let's say your about page from your static site was called about.html. You would use Path Redirect to redirect that to the new URL. The path redirect settings would be:

Old URL: about.html
New URL: node/5

You could make the new URL be "about" but then if you changed the path of the about page then redirect will be broken. If you redirect to node/5 then global redirect will redirect it to /about.

Hope this makes sense. I feel like I'm rambling.

himagarwal’s picture

Wow! This has been such a great explanation of using path redirect and global redirect to its best.

I would completely agree with you that to avoid breakage in links it is better to redirect to nodes and then to path url aliases. But won't google penalize such kinda things as per SEO when you direct a link twice.

I used global redirect in another drupal website today where it is running perfectly but I'm not able to figure it out why it is not running in drupal website in which I'm currently working. I think since drupal is installed in a sub-folder it might be the reason for not working???

And do you know if path redirect module adds redirection in .htaccess files or not?

Thanks for your "major" help again.