Hello all I have spent the best part of 2 years building up my website and improving backlinks. the site uses mod-rewrites to change URL paths to search engine friendly pages, e.g. domain.com/brand/jeans. i am planning to change my server soon and also use a new shopping cart that will rewrite the URL's in different ways. now i am ranking very highly for some of my inner pages (using my current re-writing). what i want to know is if google is intelligent enough to pick up on this, or if i would essentially be starting again? please share your thoughts and experiences! thanks
Unless you setup proper 301 redirects you would have to start building links to your internal pages all over again. If your domain has enough link power, you may get a lot of the rankings back eventually. You will likely lose rankings at least temporarily though.
As vansterdam said 301 redirect is the solution. You can also modify the new shopping cart to rewrite the URLs in the same way like the previous.