Changing Sites Link Structure - redirect old urls?

Well I'm doing a major overhaul of my sites existing link structure and thousands of people link to my pages. What i want to do is take any existing links to are out there and create a rewrite rule which forwards the request to the new page on the new structure. My questions is, for SEO related issues, what's the best method in doing this?

EG:
old link - http://www.mysite.com/cat/url.php
new link - http://www.mysite.com/show/2/cat/url.php

I don't want to affect my search rankings in a negative fashion. I'm guessing some type of simply .htaccess rewrite but not sure whats best for SE reasons.

Would this be bad?
Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/newfile.html

Thanks in advance.

Steve

 

doing this kind of thing can be hazardous if done improperly. so do lots of research. I cant think of any good links off hand. but yea. do lots of research then MORE research.

i DO know however that you want to 301 redirect the old to the new. that is the best, most typical thing to do in this situation.

 

Thanks so far I've found:

redirect 301 /oldsite http://www.yoursite.com/new/index.php

Is SEO friendy

 

ramprage,

I recently changed the folder and linking structure for one of my largest communities. Over 220,000 pages indexed. I 301'd all of my pages from subdomain.mydomain.com/threadid.htm to www.mydomain.com/subfolder/threadid.htm

My pages moved over perfectly and while I saw a drop in traffic for about a month, it's slowly starting to increase again. I'm about 15% under what I was before the move.

Make absolutely sure your 301's are redirecting properly and returning the correct headers. Test, Test, and re-test. Then monitor webmaster central closely to see if google is having problems with URLs.

 

that is right. 301 redirect is the best way to redirect old pages. Never use meta redirects.