Many businesses are in a dilemma when it comes to upgrading or migrating their web site. On one hand, several existing web pages may have a high Google Page Rank (or other search engine ranking) as a result of several in-bound links from several other sites.

On the other hand, this high ranking is useless because the web page is outdated (either the technology or the content) and does not contribute towards lead conversion or initiating a web dialogue.

There are basically 2 techniques that I use to help businesses migrate all or part of their web site to a new i-Dialogue customer portal. Note:

301 Redirects. This involves mapping existing web content to a new location and crafting some 301 status messages that instruct search engine crawlers and web browsers to visit the new site or page. These 301 redirectors may be maintained indefinitely, but usually 3-6 months is recommended.

Extension Mapping. Web pages developed in the 90's likely have file extensions that end in ".htm" or ".html". Newer web sites may use extensions like ".jsp", ".cf", ".asp", or ".aspx". While the ".aspx" is the default used for i-Dialogue portals, it is possible to map page extensions to any number of characters.

So instead of redirecting your existing productName.html page to productName.aspx, we simply map all requests for the ".html" extension to the newer ".aspx" extension and the page requester doesn't notice the difference.

Note that Google and other search engines use a wide variety of algorithms to rank pages, and a complete overhaul of a web site, regardless if the URLs are kept in tact, often leads to temporary reduction in page rank; but with (hopefully) a long term gain since the entire portal has been optimized for the search engine.