Can and How do i redirect

[perfectseats.com]

We have an old site www.holytickets.com we have not done any updates or changes to this site in over a year. For some reasons Yahoo and MSN really seems to like this site, it constantly ranks higher in the serps than our main site. So here is the problem - most of the pages are outdated. When this site was made we were making all pages (over 20,000) static, now all our pages are dynamic. So now the updated pages have different url. here is an example of the old page vs new page.
old page - http://www.holytickets.com/features/GeorgeStrait.htm
new page - http://holytickets.com/cheap_asp_ei...ets_feature.htm

Does anyone have a suggestion how I can redirect the index for the old static pages to the new unindex dynamic pages.

thanks for any help.

[chrishirst]

what server-side code (ASP, PHP) or server type (IIS, Apache) any access to the server?

[perfectseats.com]

yes we own the server, code is ASP, server type is IIS

[chrishirst]

shouldn't be a problem then.
are you talking dozens, hundreds or thousands of pages?

any common features between the old and new pagenames?

[perfectseats.com]

20,000 plus pages, each page total different event

if you look at the 2 examples in my orginal post, that may answer your question better than i can:cheers:

[chrishirst]

yep, but cheap_asp_ei...ets_feature.htm doesn't tell me a lot :D

A script will need some common feature between the page names to be able to build on. the rest can be created on the fly and concantenated.

[ihelpyou]

concatenated

1. To connect or link in a series or chain.
2. Computer Science. To arrange (strings of characters) into a chained list.


:read:

[perfectseats.com]

Originally posted by chrishirst
yep, but doesn't tell me a lot :D

A script will need some common feature between the page names to be able to build on. the rest can be created on the fly and concantenated.

Sorry the message board edit it, here it is again
www.flyhtickets.com
/cheap_asp_eid-316_event-George+Strait_tickets_feature.htm

[chrishirst]

Originally posted by ihelpyou
concatenated

1. To connect or link in a series or chain.
2. Computer Science. To arrange (strings of characters) into a chained list.

:doh: It's late here Doug (my excuse and I'm sticking to it :D )

[ihelpyou]

No prob. you just spelted it wong. :D

I never spell wrong. :rolleyes:

[chrishirst]

Ok after a sleep and a look at this, While it is certainly possible to script something to do the URL transform. the time to write and test it would possibly outweigh any benefits for the domain you cited. Unless this is a these pages show a worthwhile conversion rate.

The reasons are, because the original page names have no logical seperator other than an uppercase letter (GeorgeStrait, RollingStones) with exeptions (B2K, MGMGrandHotel and no doubt the odd McSomething as well) Therefore any requested URL parsing script would need to use a fairly complex regular expression replace function with a dictionary (associative array) of exceptions to do any decent kind of URL matching. Even then a custom 404 page as a fallback would be essential.

Indexed pages in Google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=site%3Awww.holytickets.com&btnG=Search), Yahoo (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Awww.holytickets.com&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&b=191) & MSN (http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=MSNH&q=site%3Awww.holytickets.com). Many of these are Supplemental Results in Google and I would suspect they are on the way out rather than in.

So with such a relatively small number of pages to be concerned about, dropping them and a custom 404 page with a script that extracted the first few characters of the errored page name then used that string to run a wildcard search of the database and offer the results as suggestions to the user agent is probably a simpler option. If it was based on the template for the site and not forgetting to send a 404 to the UA it would get the dead pages removed and give real visitors somewhere to go.