Actually, no....

> You've 404'd all the original pages and in effect loaded up 500+ new
> pages.

Luckily, I started with ONE page.  I have over 500 to do, but I wasn't going to mess with the other 499 until I was sure I came out okay with the first one.

WHEWY!!

And this isn't what I did -- I'll tell you at the end what I did (or intended to do) -- but your answer triggered some questions:

> Have you checked that the old pages are definitely sending a 404 header.

I can't remember, but I think "404" is "Page Not Found," and I don't have one of those... I have a Missing Link page.

> Sometimes they don't and if they still send a 200 header, the duplicate
> content penalty can kick in.

Thanks!  I have no idea what a "200 header" is, but I will find out for future reference.

> Worse is yet to come - even if the 404's have worked, because you used 404
> instead of 301 for the old pages, the search engines, and google
> especially, could well look on the re-done pages as "NEW"
> content and trigger the sandbox filter.

I don't understand.

Is "NEW" content a bad thing?  I know about the sandbox, but I obviously don't understand how it works.

I will be totally rewriting (over the next few months) every one of my 500 animal pages.  The gist will be the same, but the words will be very different and lots of new facts will be added.  Is that going to trigger the dreaded Sandbox Effect?

Also, I decided to put my blog right on the web site instead of hosting it on Blogger, because I thought daily new content was a good thing?

Thanks for all the info...

What I actually did was keep a photo of Mr. Giraffe on the original page, with a giant link that said, "Click Here to Visit our New Giraffe Exhibit."

I thought 500+ redirects (301) even over a few months would be way over the top.

On one of the SEO boards, somebody said what essentially amounted to a "We Have Moved" page could be viewed as nothing but a "doorway" page, and at that point I decided to scrap the whole idea.

My critter pages will remain ###.htm --

Except over the Christmas Crash (which I attribute to kids being out of school), I get about 5,000 visitors a day, and I don't want to mess with success.

The reason I'm intent on doing better, however, is that only a SMALL fraction of my animal pages are in Google's top 10, and virtually ALL my traffic comes from those critters.

I believe I can put my traffic through the roof if I can just get the other hundreds of animals up in the first two pages.

Thanks again!

Luv,