I've got a number of pages on my site with good content with lots of helpful keywords, but I plan to have those pages forwarded to new pages. Will a redirect impact the SEO for these pages? since users are redirected after a few seconds will google pick up on that? I thought about just deleting them, but wouldn't it more beneficial to have BOTH the old pages and new pages of content? thanks
Using redirects is a very good way to keep your ranking weight. By using a 301 redirect, you could transfer some of the weight your old pages had to the new ones. You won't lose your old pages weight.
Redirects will not be harmful to your site at all, although you tend to lose some link juice in the process. Search engines will index and rank the new pages.
Redirecting old pages to new ones is the best option.... A 301 redirect will transfer all the credit of old url to the new url. The rankings will dip for a while... but will improve as Search engines realize the 301 redirect Do not delete your old pages, if you do, you will loose all the backlinks with those pages. On top of that, your deleted pages will appear in search results and when visitor click on them they will get 404 error on the page.
404's are seen as natural for a website. Although these may appear in search results prior to the deletion of pages, search engines will naturally de-index them over time and they certainly don't harm your rankings unless you have loads of them on your site. That's why it's a good idea to redirect them as soon as possible to a similar page on the site, or as a final alternative, back to the home page.
The PR is not transferred instantly with a 301, this is why some people believe that 301's are penalized by Google. If you check your PR 10 days later (or so) you will see that your old URL PR was transferred to the new one. a 301 won't affect you in the long run but you are definitely going to lose some link juice. Good luck!
How could a 301 be penalized by Google? They encourage you to 301 redirect to ensure that visitors see something that is almost relevant to what they were searching for.... If you do the right thing with redirects you won't lose ANY link juice/PR... simply take note of your existing URLs before a change, and then redirect them post-change.. it's not hard really.....
Yes, Sometimes you may lose PR of the pages while redirecting. 301 redirection will not always give you the same weightage as the previous old page have. You may lose some credibility.