Two part Question in regards to the need to keep URLs the same when updating a site for the sake of maintaining the SEO we have (which is quite good): Our current (old) site is all .html files with no page/subpage URL structure. Regardless of what page you are on, and where it is within the site, it is always www.domain.com/page.html - there is around 30 pages within the site so instead of www.bournece.com/projects/parks.html it is www.bournece.com/parks.html The new site is going to be a wordpress site, which will create a structure for pages and subpages in the url's. 1. - Should I attempt to reuse the urls somehow in wordpress? (though im not sure yet how to do this since it would mean hiding/removing the 'projects' page in the example) 2. - how is the url effected by having every page be a ".html"? Do i need to worry about this since the new site will obviously not have that in the url since they wont be .html files?
Having or not having extension (.html) in urls doesn't matter and you can change the url structures as well and should map (redirect 301) the old urls to the new ones for preserving the backlink/pr value.