301 redirects - one overall redirect or an individual one for each page url

[Pday]

Hi

I am working on a site that is to relaunch later on this year - is best practise for the old urls (of which there are thousands) to write a piece of code that will cover all of the urls and redirect them to the new home page or to individually redirect each url to its new counterpart on the new site.  I am naturally concerned about user experience on this plus losing our Google love we currently have but am aware of the time it would take to do this individually.  Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Search Office Space's answer nailed it.

[YNWA]

We have just done this. Not for thousands but for about 800 links.

We matched each category to category, each product type to product type. Each homepage to homepage.

For products we just redirected to the brands main page which contains all products for that brand. Once stock is sold its sold so better to redirect to the brand in case rather than to a homepage or nothing at all.

Extra work but worth it in the end I would say.

[SearchOfficeSpace23]

It might be more work, but as you point out your users would be happier to have a result that better matches their query rather than all going to a home page.

However, I do recognise the work involved here so rather than do each page 301'ed to the new equivalent I would often break the site up into categories or sections and sub-sections, so in that way the most important pages (good link profile, higher PR etc.) are linked to their exact new equivalent, while the majority get a script that redirects them to the most relevant section of the site so that the user is getting a relevant page returned for their query.