SEOenthusiast

Use Correct Redirects
If you have to move pages to another domain or another section of the site, do it without losing all the web clout the search engines have already given you, and do it without making the result messy from the viewpoint of search engines and incurring a penalty. Use a 301 permanent redirect in the htaccess file.
Don't just move pages without thinking through the consequences. You've had pages indexed by the search engines and they now have your URL with content cached. Will they just guess that the page has been moved? Even if they did - the page often still exists in isolation. The new page now has the exact same content which may trigger a duplicate content penalty by the SE's, particularly Google. View the moving of a number of pages as a minature project - in complex cases you may even need a project manager. You have the possibility of screwing up the success you currently have with the search giants - don't just move pages without signalling every case to the search engines in the way they require - a 301 Permanent Redirect.
Make a list of all the pages to be moved along with the old URL they correspond to. The following assumes you have a htaccess file. If your host doesn't support the htaccess file, the same can be put into the headers of the old pages if the pages are able to be scripted. If they can't be scripted, i.e. if they are just html files, you'll habve to turn server side includes on, dump the content into a scriptable file, and 'include' the new script as the only content of the old html file. Then do the following redirect in the new script, which from this point is written as if the simpler option of the htaccess file were available. Ready? Open the htaccess file and write the following syntax:
Redirect permanent /first_part second_part
...where first_part = the old URL minus the root and with the forard slash indicating a folder, and second_part = the new fully qualified URL. For example if the page http://www.mysite.com/bluewidgets/blue_a_to_m.php is to be moved to http://www.mysite.com/bluewidgets/blue_a_to_d.php, then the line would read:
Redirect Permanent /bluewidgets/blue_a_to_m.php http://www.mysite.com/bluewidgets/blue_a_to_d.php
...though the initial forward slash for the old URL differs across some hosts according to their server structure. This syntax also holds true if the move is to a distinct domain. In this example, putting the htaccess fiel in the bluewidgets folder as it's root, means that the folder structure part of the syntax can be dropped in the first_part, but not in the second_part.
If the new URL is 'mod rewritten'
That will all work for each page (or by a regular expression, which is beyond the scope of this discussion) if the page that is being moved is not itself a page generated by a script pulling information in most cases from a database, and is in the htaccess file in a mod_rewrite structure. In that case the htaccess file is conflicting, There are two conflicting statements about a single file, which results in the server 'hanging'. The rewrite statement will have to be part of the page itself - in the headers of the page, which is generally constructed through a script. Just include the headers in the first part of the file you write by the script.
The PHP ini file special case
If the page is being moved accross a domain, e.g from mysite.com to mysite.biz, a special case arises if the host has the ini file set up to append session ID's to the URL from the old to the new - a common scenario. In this case, every time the SE bot visits, a distinct session Id is appended, which is promptly disregarded by the destination site. This occurs when the link from the old site is not fully qualified. Change all the outgoing links (which by now will be redirected) to have fully qualified links to the new site - it's a pain but not so much of a pain as fixing the problem once it's been running for a while. If this has been discovered after going live and you notice through the Google search command site:www.mysite.com that Google has already indexed pages showing the appended session Id's, then see our section on losing duplicate content by PHPSessID
Move pages the way the search engines ask that they be moved. The PR will pass to the new quickly and you'll retain the clout they've already given you. The alternative is to risk PR loss and bot confusion, a combination that leads to nothing good!
Further Reading: Correct Direction for Search Engines | Jill Whalen Forum on 301 Redirects


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