My company has been in biz for close to 30 years with 4 of them on the Internet. We are currently changing our website to be more friendly towards the user, especially with our new more efficient shopping cart. As of right now we have great PR and good rankings on Google for most of our keyterms. We are going to be changing the pages that Google has us listed with and we will have to re-direct traffic to our new static pages, which are full of relevant content. Our address is remaining the same, however, our static pages are changing their URL's (the URL's will be cleaner than before as well). The site will be cleaner and easier to browse, while keeping the pieces of SEO that made our site successful. Will making these changes hurt our visibility on Google or are these changes that will benefit us? Any suggestions or advice are appreciated.
You might have a temporary drop while the engines update their index to the new page. Time frame will depend on your authority level but it usually happens fairly quickly. Be sure to properly redirect them using a 301 redirect. A secondary project would be link reclamation. Go through and get your inbound links changed to the proper URL. The "PR value" will be passed with the 301, but the anchor text value will not.
good advice TheMadHat. I was just about to suggest the same thing. I recently did the same thing. Dont have the time for link reclamation. We were fine because all of our traffic from from the main index page. We did experience a light drop but our new pages were indexed pretty quickly. I would also suggest doing some link building for the new main category pages with your targeted key phrases. Good Luck.
301 is the way to go even if its a pain in the butt. "visually" your site will lose PR but the effect should only be for a little while. I would seriously look at your backlinks and see where they point. There will more than likely be some casualties but you want to keep the bulk of them if possible. I had a client that did a MOD re-write and the same problem came up. The suffered for about 4 weeks while Google was indexing the new pages but they are 1000% better of now than they ever were before. Dynamic URL strings are a complete nightmare so I can feel your pain. Let me know if you need any advice, I'd be happy to help out.