SEO questions, changing URLS and impact on results - Will pay for answer

A client of mine has a well established site that ranks in top 10 for all keywords (the homepage). However, they want to change the urls from website.com/232/11/ to something like website.com/design/services/ to have inner pages rank well on search engines as well. If they make this change, should a 301 redirect be done on the old URLs, whats the best way to let google know about the change (sitemap?), and will it hurt the current rankings that are already established? Thank you and I have $5 in my PayPal account for a solid and correct answer. Thanks.

 

I have heard that a 301 will not hurt your rankings. I think sitemaps would also help to quickly update google to the new addresses.

 

I have done it personally on my websites with 301 redirect and thats the best way to go if you want to maintain the pagerank and search results position.
If you need info on how to do it, PM me. It is fairly straight forward on apache with mod-rewrite installed. I used .htaccess for about 93 urls.

 

Thanks for the reply, but Im really looking for someone who KNOWS not just heard. Sorry to be blunt. I need to make sure, because the client makes a good profit from their current rankings in search engines and Id really hate to see that get lost.

 

Would this still work if the client has over 100,000 pages indexed by Google? Thanks.

 

Theoretically Yes, in my past experience about 100 pages worked fine. The thing is with .htaccess you are asking the apache to rewrite the URL which ofcourse is resource intensive. So you have a trade off...Once google starts to index the new pages, you can remove the older pages from the .htaccess.

You can also submit a new sitemap to google with all the new pages.

 

Thank you very much. Please send your paypal address to me via PM.

 

well thanks for the offer but I think I dont need $5. If you really want to give away $5, please donate it to some charitable organization.

Cheers
Girish

 

Girish,
Good man. Do you have a charitable organization of preference?

 

No, I do not have any preference. But if you want, you can send it to some Organization dealing with Children's welfare.

 

Use redirect it won't hurt u in anyways.. I've done it in the past..

 

I figured this would be a good time to donate to Toys for Tots Foundation. Money sent. Thanks and rep added.

 

OK, here's the skinny

Once the new pages are creted remove the old pages and put redirects (mod rewrite if Unix/Linux/Lamp) to the new pages.

At this point it will take a while and likely there will be drops and a rebound

NOW - if you want to be real finicky, do a page removal once all the love has firmly passed and once more in 6 months (supp index takes 12 months, removal tool last for 6.. go figure)

Any questions... ask away.. Hope the kids get something nice....

 

i would say, leave it as it is
you are saying that the website is already working well so don't make dramatic changes.
and the keywords in the url is not that important (notice dp forum here is using almost the same url structure that you want to change in your customer web site)
you just have to follow a deep linking policy to give the inner pages some strength.

301 are good and effective i tried it a lot with no problems just a temporary drop then it will rebound... but also google is really mad so moving this large amount of pages can trigger something or get you penalized for a reason or another so if you will perform 301 make it gradually so you can stop if something wrong happens

 

it's a real old thread.... see the date