advice please?

I'd like to use mod rewrite to have the content category names in the url, instead of "/category/8/" .. have it be "/pregnancy/signsofpregnancy/"

It's an 8 year old site.. it has a PR5 and several inside pages are PR4's and 3's.. What do you think would happen to my google PR and SERPS if I changed all my urls? I have about 10,000 pages.

My concern is this.. will google think im duplicating content, and ban me? I get most of my SE traffic from google and yahoo.

If it's going to mess with my rankings for the worse.. I won't bother... because i have a nice consistent flow of about 150,000 uniques per month.. and the site is my primary household income.

LOL I've had the new stuff done for about 2 weeks but afraid to launch the new pages.

Thanks in advance!

 

I would advice you against removing the old directory structure completely instead have 301 redirects from the older pages to the new pages that you create. This will ensure that the traffic you get is properly redirected and no duplicate content is created .

 

Well you could change just one category and see how it fares in the SEs & SERPs

 

I dont recommend it .. as you will aslo lose the value of BackLink's if you have any to these categories as they would be pointing to non-existing pages (now renamed).

I will clarify why I dont recommend it with an example:
Suppose you change "/category/8/" to "/pregnancy/signsofpregnancy/"

your ranked page in the SE will still be "/category/8/" and you decide to rename everything the end result will be "PAGE NOT FOUND" so I would suggest that you have a "301" redirect until you get better rankings for ur new categories

 

Hopefullly it goes without saying that a 301 would be in place.

 

i'll have to check with my server admin.. because the /category/8/ is already mod rewrite.. so not sure how to do 301.. but obviously this is what would need to be done.. im not too familiar with mod rewrite so.. i think im gonna think more on this before i do anything.. or try just one category at a time.. see what happens

 

See this thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=23044&highlight=mod+rewrite

Nintendo is a mod rewrite God!

Also, there is a handy tool to create the rewrites from dynamic to static. I know you have already done that part, but it might be helpful for someone else: http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mod_rewrite-rewriterule-generator.shtml