I need some good advice - I'm currently rewriting all the old category pages which link from the navigation bars, sitewide. The new pages will basically be the same as the old, but with different URLs and a few extra on-page features. I was wondering what which move would be more clever: Simply changing the link to the new page from the nav bar/sitemap when it is created, and leaving the old category to basically dissapear off the site. or Leave the old URLs in the nav/sitemap, but run a redirect to the new pages.I'm leaning more towards the latter, but there's another issue - lately, all new pages don't want to become indexed. They're in the sitemap and appropriately linked from elsewhere in the site, but no matter how many backlinks point to them and traffic goes to the page, Google just doesn't seem to want to index them. Suggestions and opinions would be greatly appreciated, Thanks in advance.
Why not both? As you update pages change navigation and sitemap to the new page and 301 the old page to new since some of the old pages are indexed and maybe have backlinks.