Best way to migrate to a new URL structure

[anthematic]

Hello everyone,

We’re changing our URL structure from something like this: example.com/index.php?language=English

To something like this: example.com**/english/**index.php

The change is implemented with mod_rewrite so all the old URLs can still work

We have hundreds of thousands of pages that are currently indexed with the old URL structure

What’s the best way to get Google to rapidly update its index and to maintain as much ranking as possible?

• 301 redirect all the old URLs to the new equivalent format?

• If we detect that the URL is in an old format, render the page with a canonical tag pointing to the new equivalent format as well as adding a noindex, nofollow tag?

• Something else?

Thanks for your input!

[Catalyste]

Alan response is great, but if by any chance you are using wordpress and want to migrate to a new permalink structure I would recommand this plugin.

This will allow you to change your URL structure and put in place de redirections for one another.

[AlanMosley]

1. REWRITE the new url to the old url, unless you have reworked your code to read the new urls.

2. REDIRECT the old url to the new one, incase you already have links to the old urls, you dont want duplicate content

3. you need to make sure that all internal links point to the new url, you dont want un-necessary redirects as they leak link juice.

If you are using IIS server, this is so easy todo, just a few clicks, see half way down page

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/microsoft-technologies-and-seo-web-development