Scenario

You are upgrading your web site and as part of the upgrade, it means moving and renaming particular files.

Danger

Search engines have indexed your entire site and pages you’re going to move or rename rank well. By altering these files, you run the risk of losing a lot of traffic and leaving visitors to your site who follow a search engine link with the dreaded “Error 404 – File not found”.

A 301 redirect is the best way to go and I go into some detail on how to implement one in this tutorial, but first let’s take a look at a couple of other strategies I often see mentioned around the web to get around the problem and why you shouldn’t use them.