I'm reconstructing a tables site of 60 pages into straight css for better seo, I want to rename my pages which are now named pagetopic.html to page_topic_widget.html. The site gets about 2500 unique visitors a month and is somewhat seasonal starting now, a crucial time to be indexed. Is this going to hurt my site's performance, access, etc? should I wait to rename the pages? Use a 302 page? go ahead and figure google will pick it up? the site is five years old, with a redesign 14 mos ago - after five months I still saw of the old page names being indexed in yahoo? how do I go about it with minimal disruption to the indexing? thanks!
I wouldn't recommend changing the page names, expecially if the pages already have Google Pagerank. If you feel like you have to then use 301 redirects. 301 means the page has been moved to a new location and forward all traffic and ranking 302 means the page has been temporarily moved to a new location and ranking will not be transferred.
If all of your pages has been cached in Google then you should prepare to do 301 redirect from those old pages to the new one to prevent loss of google cached your pages, also prevent loss of your PR too.
If pages are indexed, then forget them to change otherwise you will lose your PR, you can try this format to new pages, or try a 301 redirect for older pages.
302 redirect = yes 301 redirect = no Here's why, 301 redirect is mean permanent redirect so is not used to spam SE but 302 is tempolary so it used to spam SE's several times before. I see many people, even me, use 301 redirect in my own site for some old pages and don't see any negative results here.
Also it should be said that you should use dashes instead of underscores. For example: this-is-an-example.html instead of this_is_an_example.html. Dashes are always interpreted as spaces while underscores can be interpreted as a separate character by ignorant SEs.