Updating site - how important is it to maintain same urls?

[Barry O'Callaghan]

I'm looking to bring back to life an old site of mine that used to be an earner for me www.firbolg.com. The cms used on the site is Movable Type - a CMS that I never got used to. I'm thinking of moving it over to perhaps WordPress or CMS Made Simple.

Anyway I'm thinking it might be easier to migrate the site if I don't have to keep all the same page names. However I'm worried about 2 things primarily if I do this.

1.Will it affect the site's ratings in Google (though only the home page AFAIK has any Page Rank still)?
2. Perhaps more importantly - I've seen that some of my pages have been copied (without my permission) and used on other sites - If I rename pages on my site would this mark these pages out as false duplicates or should the fact that it's still on the original site mean I'm in the clear to do this?

[jdwanchalk]

If you use 301 redirects, it should be fine, but there is always a fair shot that Google will misread exactly what happened and dock you accordingly. 301's are a tedious process, but there really isn't any good alternative if you want the site to recoup, at least in part, the rankings that it had before.

[Barry O'Callaghan]

Thanks JD. Perhaps it might be easier after all to keep the same urls then.

[GregW]

I had a mid-sized site with around 200 or so pages that were all lumped in to the root folder with names like; pokerstars-review.html, poker-strategy.html and so on. I wanted to clean them up and put them all in to logical folders like /rooms/pokerstars/ and /strategy/. I did 301 redirects for every single page on the site.

I implemented all of the redirects at once at the end of June 2009. This a graph of my daily traffic from between April to September 2009.



I've done 301 redirects a number of times (from all the pages within a site and also sites to another site) and I've never had a problem. I'd go as far as saying that in terms of rankings and traffic, the transition has always been seamless.

On the other hand, I have heard stories about sites losing rankings or taking time to readjust, so I can't say that everything will be fine. However, what I will say is that I personally wouldn't have any qualms about changing the URLs on an entire site using 301 redirects in the future. If anything I would be more concerned about how much of a pain in the arse it would be to set up all the redirects in the first place. But at the end of the day, if a job's worth doing it's worth doing properly.