Changing Site Structure Drastically

[ScottBaxterWW]

Howdy Guys, We are in the process of changing our sites structure dramatically, at the moment this is how an internal page / URL reads: Www.mydomainname.co.uk/ww.sys/pagename We will he changing our site over to wordpress very shortly and will have the correct permalinks in place. We are scared it's going to hurt our rankings as we are in the top 6 for a highly competitive keyword at the moment - the bouns is our domain name is 11yrs old and we have a PR of 4. We have setup all the 301s in web.configuration file just wondering if any of you have made a dramatic change like this and been dropped off the rankings.....

[RyanKent]

Update them.

Ideally every URLs on the planet that pointed to the old URLs will now point to the new URLs.

[ScottBaxterWW]

Hi Ryan, Thank for the reply. The internal links shouldmi just leave them as the OLD urs or update them?

[RyanKent]

When moving a site to a new structure, if you properly 301 all your pages and update your internal links you should retain most of your rankings once the move is completely settled. Your rankings may bounce around a bit as Google does not index your site all at once, but rather captures a bit with each crawl. It often takes several weeks for a site to be fully crawled.

Once your site is fully crawled you may lose a minor amount of ranking due to the loss of linking power from the 301 redirects. I would advise updating all the links possible to reflect the new URLs. Any links to your site that you control in signatures, facebook, etc. should be updated.

Some people have made this change and everything went very smoothly. Others had a rougher transition which was usually due to not properly 301'ing all the pages or updating their links.