Question about cannonical URLs for a site redesign

[seonubblet]

Hello folks, I've redesigned a site completely and I ended up changing their CMS to wordpress as well. So their URLs which mostly ended in .html and folder organization have been thrown completely out the window with wordpress' '/' format. I'm just wondering what the best way is to approach retaining all the site's previous "link juice". What should I be doing here? How do I make sure their organic rankings don't fall? (They've left their previous SEO firm so they can't help me out on this).

Thanks!

[vmialik]

Actually 301s are good, and many times the way to go, for more clarification check this out:

http://moz.com/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

[seonubblet]

Hello Vadim, I was aware of changing the permalink structure in WordPress but the problem is their old CMS was really bulky and messy and contained many unnecessary folders and sub folders that I didn't want to recreate on the updated site.

I thought that the best way to do this was through rel=cannonical? So instead of redirecting the old pages to the corresponding URLs I would just need to make sure that each page is under one main URL? I thought 301 redirects were a nono actually. I could be mistaken.

[vmialik]

Hi Seonubblet,

You can create redirects, or here is an interesting method to retain .html structure by changing the permalink to /%postname%.html in Wordpress, check it out:

http://www.cybercoded.net/convert-static-html-site-to-wordpress-easily/

Let me know if this helps