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We are making a change to our Navigation and this includes having to change the URL structure of a few pages of our site.   Due to issues with the CMS (that are out of my control) we are unable to keep the current URL structure of two of our highest ranking pages.   Our site is an E-commerce Site The Structure is changing from..... www.domain.com/page/highrankingpage  <----OLD PAGE RANKED WELL to www.domain.com/category/highrankingpage   <----NEW PAGE Generally I would have 301 'd this page but I found out that our Tech team added a Canonical to this page instead....(showing the high ranking page to the Search Engines) and on our site the visitors are able to browse the website getting the new page. BOTH PAGES ARE BASICALLY IDENTICAL (Same Content) http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical# Thoughts?

Reading over Rands latest Post about URL structure I had a quick question about the best way to convert URL's that don't have perfect URL structure... Current the Structure of our E-commerce store has a structure that is not friendly with domain.com/product/zdcd-jobd3d-fdoh what is the easiest way to convert these to read URL's without causing any disruptions with the SERP.   Are we talking about a MOD-Rewrite in the CMS.......

I will keep this short and sweet.   We have some websites in the same niche area but want to focus only on our newest site (basically all the information that was being posted on the other sites will now be part of our new site) This will save us a lot of time and increase our focus on 1 entity.   Should we redirect these website with a 301 redirect to the specific categories that they focus on in the new site?  or should we redirect to the main domain.