Website redesign and URL restructuring
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REMOVED
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hi
i agree with the advice from brent couldn't have said it better myself, here an articles you may find useful:
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
http://www.seomoz.org/q/setting-up-a-301-redirect-from-expired-webpages
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hey-google-im-over-here-a-301-experiment
hope they help, good luck with the task
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It doesn't matter if you everything perfectly, still expect a drop in traffic for 1 to 2 months then gradually you'll see increase and improve from current traffic.
if your client can gulp that it is good. Just make things clear.
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I think you have the key components covered with the 301, but I would also make sure that you have no internal redirects and that you update your XML Sitemaps and get them submitted at the same time. Once you make the change, and run internal crawls of the site (and no errors), then you should utilize GWT and up your crawl speed and Fetch as Googlebot to start resubmitting the new content.
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