A challenge when moving any website into a new system like Adobe Business Catalyst is insuring that any existing links appearing in Google search results when clicked will connect to specific pages in the new website.

This is normally done by creating a list of redirects, a directory of the URL addresses the old site's pages mapped to the URLs on the new site, so Google can readjust its info.

However, there's a problem if you need to redirect to a new page in Business Catalyst that doesn't end in a .htm, .html or other file type but rather looks like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/some-page-name/

or http://www.yoursite.com/some-page-name

Your redirect to that link will fail with a "404 Error - Page Not Found" If you create it following instructions in the BC's redirect instructions.

I discovered this when migrating to Business Catalyst a web site from WordPress in which almost all the pages on the WordPress site ended in a /  and so I was also trying to redirect the old URLs to new URLs in BC ending in a /.

In particular, if you are trying to redirect an old site's link to a shopping cart catalog URL in the new site, since all BC catalog URLs end in / then no redirects will work.

Fortunately, working with Matt B. at BC Tech Support, a solution was found by using a little trick. It turns out that Business Catalyst assumes any URL ending in / is referring to a folder, not a page, which causes BC to report the errors. So you have to trick BC into thinking there is a a page.

The trick is to redirect http://www.yoursite.com/some-old-page-name/ in the old site to http://www.yoursite.com/some-new-page-name/index.htm in the new BC site, even though there really is no page named index.htm.  That works to redirect to a Business Catalyst page like  http://www.yoursite.com/some-new-page-name/ or a BC shopping cart catalog like http://www.yoursite.com/shoes/

That little trick saved my client from losing hundreds of existing links already recorded in Google search results.