Migrating a site with new URL structure

[DanDeceuster]

I recently redesigned a website that is now in WordPress. It was previously in some odd, custom platform that didn't work very well. The URL's for all the pages are now more search engine friendly and more concise.

The problem is, now Google has all of the old pages and all of the new pages in its index. This is a duplicate problem since content is the same.

I have set up a 301 redirect for every old URL to it's new counterpart. I was going to do a remove URL request in Webmaster Tools but it seems I need to have a 404 code and not a 301 on those pages to do that.

Which is better to do to get the old URL's out of the index? 404 them and do a removal request or 301 them to the new URL? How long will it take Google to find these 301 redirects and keep just the new pages in the index?

[DanDeceuster]

Yeah we had tons of top 10 rankings and now nothing is better than 100. I thought the way I did it would work the fastest but needed some validation I guess.

[StalkerB]

Did the very same thing a couple of times and went with the 301 option.

If you 404 them and remove them then you're relying on Google fully crawling your new structure in a timely and thorough fashion. It'll take time for them to process these new URLs and I'd imagine that even if the pages never had many or any links into them you don't want what authority they had to be lost entirely.

Users will scarcely notice as long as they get to a page with the info they want.

It took almost a month for all the URLs to be replaced in the SERPs but I think it was definitely the right way to go about it. Otherwise I think we would have taken an even bigger hit to the search traffic (and we already lost about 40% for those 3/4 weeks).

[charliesaidthat]

Personally I am with you on 301'ing the old pages to the new ones. I would submit the new sitemap to Google and wait.

It can take a month or two for old pages to shift completely.