Revamping your site? Tell the search engines!
If you give your website an overhaul pages may move, be deleted or be replaced. Although a person viewing your site may not be aware of your site's internal structure it can be very important.
If you moved house you would tell the post office where to send your mail, wouldn't you?
Your website should be no different.
The problem:
For example, one of the sites I'm involved with underwent a complete overhaul a couple of years ago and the pages moved from being named somepage.html to somepage.php, while in other cases we removed pages completely.
We knew that Google had indexed those pages, plus there were other inbound links from other sites that we could not control. The problem we faced was how to change the pages without losing any of the traffic.
The solution
If your site is hosted on linux, then you can use Apache's mod_rewrite via a few lines in a .htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
Redirect somefilename.html http://www.yoursite.com/somenewfile.php
If you are moving all your pages from .html to .php you can use a regular expression to match
If you need to find out more have a look at some of these links:
