I have some web pages within a directory on my site, they have a pr3 ranking, I don't really want to lose it, whats the best way to move my pages to another directory on my site without losing my pr and search engine placement.
you could do a redirect... but why are you even moving them? Is it really necessary? Even if you do a redirect you can always end up loosing any rankings, and PR will take a while to be passed through to the new pages
Because I had them hidden in about 6 or 7 directories deep in my web root, ended up with a real long url, does this affect anything having a long url??
I made major changes to one of my sites' urls recently. 301 redirected thousands of pages. There was a brief drop in traffic (~1.5 weeks) and now all is back to normal and seems to already be paying back as the traffic seems to be higher than before the changes were applied.
Read http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=23044 . If you still have questions after reading it, post again