last week I changed internal urls on a new 1 month old site away from spammy keyword urls to "clean" non-keyword stuffed urls (I did this due to a suspected Google over-optimisation penalty). I deleted old urls but copied content and deoptimised code into new clean urls. Someone on a different forum said that I should NOT 301 redirect from old urls to new urls in case the urls this carried a penalty/filter with them. Now, however, when I search for "keyword + town", the old urls appear on page 3 and the new urls are way below - this suggests to me that Google trusts the old spammy urls more than new clean urls. Question: should I 301 redirect the old urls to the new or trust that Google will sort its indexes out in time and put the new clean urls higher up in its index???
My suggestion is only bother to use a 301 redirect for any pages that have backlinks. Otherwise just be patient
why do you think you have a penalty from google? Did google tell you this. I can almost certainly guarantee you that you are not being penalized for over optimized urls. You are wasting your time... you just dont have enough quality links to your site or your site is not well-optimized. Keep in mind that it can take years to rank for difficult key words. Anyway, you should definitely do a 301 redirect. It can only help. The fact of the matter is however, that by changing your url you have just set yourself back further as far as seo. Even if you do a 301 redirect, you will not get 100% of the pr passed to your new url.
Pr is not an issue here- it's a new site and there were only a few forum signature links pointing to those pages.
That's true. Having 301 is the best way to retain the value of old domains or urls for new one. So just check out if you are having any worthy backlinks for those pages. If yes, then just go for 301