I’m working on a personal project site at the moment. When building it I was in a hurry to get the first lot of pages up and didn’t plan for site expansion very well; that lack of planning has now come back to bite me squarely on the butt.

Now I want to change the page names and location of some files and remove others from the server. I’ve used redirects before (the option available in my server) to permanently redirect old files to new. That said I don’t want to have lots of old files still on the server, their only purpose to redirect visitors to other files.

All the offending files are indexed in Search Engines but only one is cached.

Can I simply rename and relocate files without redirects?
Should I redirect all old files to new replacements?
Is there a standard protocol I should follow?
If I simply remove or rename files, will the next SE indexing show the changes and leave the old file names out?

Thanks.

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Yes, old file was left in place and a redirect to new file set-up.

"get the server to do the redirect"
I already asked them about this but maybe I was not clear enough. Thanks for the advice, 301 looks like the solution.

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Just to wrap this up for anyone else who had a similar question; once the redirect is permanently set-up on your server, the old file can be removed from your server.

The use of 'permanent' in the redirect suggested to me that the old file would permanently redirect to the new one (if left in place).

Not everyone is as slow as me with these things but for those of you who are you need never reveal yourselves.

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New Odyssey | Cheap Websites | Baby Travel Hire

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