New Site maintaining rank on old URL's

[ocelot]

Hi

I have a new website going live which has a different page names etc i.e. the old site had pages that are ranking called aboutus.html and the new site is called about.php

What is the best approach to maintain the rank and also on orphaned pages

Many Thanks

[ocelot]

Thanks is there a way of doing a 301 of something similar inline on the page code?  For example if the old page is called product.html and the new page is called newproduct.html what could I add onto the product.html page to provide the redirect.  I dont have access and dont really want to mess about in apache

[TecmarkUK]

301 redirects are the solution here. Simply redirect URLs on the old site to their new equivalent URL on the new site.

If you have some pages that were on the old site that will NOT have a new equivalent on the new site then take a view as to whether to 301 redirect or to simply let them 404. If a page has some inbound links, ranks for some keywords or generally acquires a lot of inbound traffic from search, then it's definitely worth 301-ing. If there's no equivalent page on the new site, perhaps 301 to the homepage or most similar page that will exist.

Run a full crawl of your site before launching the new one. You can use Screaming Frog (free for up to 500 URLs) so you know exactly what's there. A site:domain.com search in Google will give you the pages Google has indexed specifically.