Launching a New Website - 301 and 404 question

[sergeant]

oops, looks like I posted this originally in a wrong category. Hope this one is the more relevant one

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Hello all,

Wondering if there's anyone out there that has had experience relaunching a new site. We currently have one that is very archaic and which will be replaced very shortly. We've consulted a couple of companies to ensure we do what's need it -seo related- for this launch. One company told us that it was imperative to resolve error codes 301 and 404. 404 we understand and know how to get around it, however for 301 errors we have been given advise that is different. One company suggested we set redirects of all our old product links to the all new product links. Another company told us that the equivalent way to get this done was to concentrate on 301 for main content and shopping categories and do a 404 for anything else. They also explained that google prefers xml maps over this and that because product pages are dynamic that these constantly changed and therefore the alternative version was not truly necessary. If anyone has experience with this can you please share your comments as to what you may work better

[Jazajay]

Hi there Sergeant.
I would peronally never give a 404 page on purpose unless for some strange reason I had 1 adult porn page in the middle of my site on child safety advice.

However if the pages are roughly related you should do a 301.
This passes the equity over and not just leaves the equity hanging on the other page.

Also any users that go to the old page via any links pointing to them or a bookmark will go to the related new page because of the redirect. a 404 will lose this small traffic.

Now I take it this is a new domain?
or is it the same domain but with new urls for the same pages?
Secondly how are your urls set up?
keyword as in -
yoursite.com/your-keyword.htm
or query as in
yoursite.com/page.php?a=1&b=2

Now if they are query urls how many querys are there in a product url?

Yes Google does like xml site maps, but if the site is search engine freindly they are not needed, also a simple html site map will accomplish the same thing - that being all your pages indexed.

Jaza