GoDaddy - 301 Redirects

[homebizoutlook]

Moderators - I first put this in Internet Marketing, you can delete there if you wish, my apologies ...

I am doing a project for a client and have run into a problem. Their current site is based on an old Joomla platform and the company that did the website is out of business. So there is no way to make changes to the site. The owner wants to move to Wordpress.

The site gets good traffic and has page rank on some good keywords so we want to maintain the traffic coming in.

The original plan was to do 301 redirects for every page on the old site to the new page on the new site, which would protect the traffic that the old site was getting, etc.

The problem is that it does not appear that GoDaddy hosting supports 301 redirects at the URL level. The only thing I can find on their website mentions the hataccess file, which I assume would redirect all traffic from that site to another site. That is not an option because we want to keep the same domain name.

So since it appears the 301 is not an option I think we are left with only two options:

- trash the site and eventually lose the page search engine rankings and traffic (not a good option)
- install Wordpress on top of the existing site and leave all Joomla code present; the only file or directory that has the same name is 'index.php', so obviously Wordpress would win out with the new install

If we do that, I would assume that when someone clicks on the old link when doing a keyword search that the traffic would then be directed to the '404 - Page Not Found' page in Wordpress because the old Joomla page would not be referenced in the Wordpress index file. We could then edit the 404 page with an explanation of what happened and then provide a list of links that the user can click through to find what they want.

Does that make sense? Are there any other solutions?

Thanks, and sorry for the long post.