If you are rebuilding or redesigning your web site it is important that you provide a means for the search engines to find your pages at their new addresses. After all it took lots of time and effort to get your pages indexed in the first place and generate traffic, so you don't want your site visitors served with "404 - page not found" messages when they visit! Setting your page addresses and redirects up properly takes a little bit of work, but it is worth the time and effort. This job is fast and easy if you build your site using Drupal. For owners of small business web sites knowing the details aren't as import as having the awareness that this needs to be done and being sure that this is on your checklist to discuss with your web developer.

In my recent case we went from static HTML pages to dynamic pages within Drupal. Assuming that your web developer has enabled clean URL rewriting your new page addresses might look something like this:

http://mysite.com/node/3.

That is a big improvement over the case where the system generates a query string like:

http://mysite.com/?q=node/3

But it still probably doesn't look the same as in your static site. Your old URL might have looked something like:

http://mysite.com/mysection/mypage.html

That is exactly how you want your page's new address to look within your new site.

Fortunately the Path module in Drupal allows you to easily re-write your existing page URLs to match the format you want. You can do this either as you are creating the content in the editor or you can access URL Aliases from the Admin > build > URL Aliases menu. This only works for content that you create in the editor that has an internal path already within Drupal.

In some cases your visitors may get "404" errors from images that were indexed on the old version of your site. You can see the problematic URLs by looking for 404 errors under admin >reports > Top 'page not found' errors. For example my old logo path was "images/logo.gif" but in my new Drupal site the path is now "http://1to1products.com/sites/all/themes/custom/1to1-custom/images/logo.gif". Unfortunately since no internal path exists for the logo this problem can't be corrected using the Path module. Instead I needed to add a type 301 permanent redirect command to my .htaccess file as follows:

RewriteRule ^images/logo.gif$ http://1to1products.com/sites/all/themes/custom/1to1-custom/images/logo.gif [R=301,L]

Again as a small business web site owner you don't need to be too familiar with the details. You just need to know that this needs to happen.