SEO suggestions on changing Filenames

[FredW]

Hi folks,

I did a search on my question and could not find anything regarding it. This concerns me, for I wonder if I'm breaking new ground in what I want to do.

For SEO reasons, we want to change our more information filenames and image filenames from what we have today to something more SEO friendly.

Let's take just the more information filename first. Today we have filenames like 67-356.htm and want to change it to Honeywell-RA832A1066/htm. We know how to easily make this change in ShopSite product definition, but have yet to figure out how to deal with the fallout of such a change.

Here is what happens. Google and other search guys, index our site and give search results pointing to our site at "...67-365.htm". We change the filename in Shop to "Honeywell-RA832A1066/htm" and when we publish these changes, ShopSite deletes the file 67-365 and creates the new file name. Before Google reindexes all our site changes, which can take days or weeks to flush our all the cache results, users who click on older search results get a 'not found' error.

I have come up with a few ways to deal with this, but none are easily to implement or are without other issues. I'm currently thinking for us to have the old named file change to do a redirect to the newly ShopSite named file, but I can't figure out how to do this in ShopSite. I have to create the htm file to do a redirect outside of ShopSite and then ftp it to the same directory under the old file name. Some time later, I will delete these redirect htm files, once I see the search engines have updated all their indexes.

I'm sure, or hope, somebody else has encountered this issue and maybe know a better trick than what I have already figured out.

Any suggestions or thoughts?

BTW, I will have the same issue with image files, but for now, I'm just want to change the more information filenames.

Thanks in advance for your time and consideration,
Fred W

[ShopSite Lauren]

Fred, you will want to use the .htaccess file (a server file) to setup redirects for those pages. The following cookbook article explains how to do this:
http://shopsite.com/templates/cookbook/seo-htaccess.shtml

[FredW]

Lauren,

Thanks for the speedy reply. Based on your help and pointer to the cookbook write up, I was able to make the changes, implement it and tested it out fine.

I really appreciate you and your team's assistance. Very helpful, timely and on target.

For those who may read this and want additional information, LexiConn has a good blog that addresses the use of this file: http://www.lexiconn.com/blog/2013/07/six-common-htaccess-mistakes/.

The only thing is that your cookbook lead me to code a statement that Lexiconn's validation checker gave an error message with.
My statements look like;
RedirectPermanent /k/67-745.htm /k/Honeywell-VS820A1054.htm

And the http://www.htaccesscheck.com/ site gives me this error message:
RedirectPermanent /k/67-745.htm /k/Honeywell-VS820A1054.htm
Redirect to non-URL

But, it does appear to work fine. Did I miss something here?

Thanks again, as usual you all provide some of the best support I have experienced in my 50 years of doing technology work.
FredW