Sha,

I wanted to send a quick update & see if we're on the right track? After implementing this 301 redirect, I'm seeing a few negatives, but also a few positives & would appreciate your feedback:

Concerns:

• Google Organic Traffic has dropped by 26.65% since we implemented the redirect (12 Days).

• Top Content Pages From Search Traffic has dropped from a weekly average of 1,500 pages to 998. I've segmented the Analytics to see if I had more or less pages that were driving traffic to my site (Organic Only).

Positives:

• Bing Organic Traffic is up 32.15% although not substantial for our overall traffic, but it has increased.

• Yahoo Organic Traffic is up 26.53% less traffic than Bing, so not substantial.

• Webmaster Tools Pages crawled per day: http://screencast.com/t/krkD69bj3mG we've had a huge spike, which I'm assuming is a good thing & a direct correlation to the 301 redirect.

All this being said, are we on the right track? The initial traffic loss had me worried, but after seeing the crawl stats it gave me hope? Do i just need to be more patient to see this through? Are we missing anything, or is this what you would expect?

Thanks,

BJ

Thanks for all the help Sha! We'll play with the example code that you'd sent & see what we can come up with. After a few weeks I'll continue to watch our organic rankings & see how it affects us overall.

Thanks,

BJ

My fear with this approach is how the search engines will handle the redirect? I know that from the users perspective this should work, but I've never read any articles that even resemble this type of approach.

Do you believe that this method will pass the value along in the search engines & treat it as a proper 301 redirect.

Thanks,

BJ

Previously our site was using this as our URL structure: www.site.com/page.html. A few months ago we updated our URL structure to this: www.site.com/page & we're not using the .html.

I've read over this guide & don't see anywhere that discusses this: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection.

I've currently got a programmer looking into, but am always a bit weary with their workarounds, as I'd previously had them cause more problems then fix it. Here is the solution he is looking to do:

The way that I am doing the redirect is fine. The problem is of where to put the code. The issue is that the files are .html files that need to be redirected to the same url with out a .html on them. I can see if I can add that to the 404 redirect page if there is one inside of there and see if that does the trick. That way if there is no page that exists without the .html then it will still be a 404 page. However if it is there then it will work as normal. I will see what I can find and get back.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

BJ