During the Rayvan re-branding to RayvanBros at the beginning of the year - we decided to leave our heavily seo-friendly website rayvan.net to become secondary - in order to migrate the individual page strength, we redirected relevant content to their newly due places. Leaving every other page to become a custom Page Not Found web page (404 error code) that leads back to the new website.

On the same topic - We were recently consulted for a private government contract to advise a realistic recommendation for migrating a 15,000+ page website into Drupal. But please do understand this is a totally different animal - although we are not talking about animals. Pages with 500+ pages should be systematically migrated.

So how do you assess if your website require systematic redirect or migration? does your website have a consistent URL file structure patterns? If so, they can redirected appropriately without the need for a 404. Here are 3 steps to make it happen (assuming your new web server is on an Apache-based server):

1. Setup the new website on a separate domain or private subfolder, if applicable. Generate a robots.txt file to block search engine crawls.
2. Use Apache's HTACCESS to setup a global redirect to identical file names to their respective directories or new domain name and/or directories.
3. All content that does not exist on the new domain should be connected to the new website's internal search engine that will use the previous file name's keywords to query all of the new web pages for relevance. If you do not have the time or budget to setup an internal search engine - contact us or use Google's Custom Search Engine - it is very easy to plug-in to your template and you can just pay the yearly commercial license fee if you need to remove advertisements

That's the gist. If you are an or hire an experienced web team performing this duty, it should take approximately 30 minutes for a small to medium scale website. Did anything confuse you, do need help with all or some of these steps? Drop us a line and don't be afraid to leave us feedback.

Thank you for your valuable time.