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As a follow up to this post, we launched the new site 3 weeks ago and seen a site-wide drop in SERPS

Of course there could be other variables involved, but we pushed ahead with the new product db without 301-ing the old products to new products as when we tried to do it, it was a far too time consuming exercise trying to pair up all the URLs in Excel.

Google has already indexed the new pages so hopefully the new site structure will not cause long term damage. In the mean time trying to 301 redirect as many of the best performing old product pages (as per Page Authority in the PRO crawl diagnostic tool).

This year we are using a new supplier and they have provided us a product database of approx. 5k products. About 80% of these products were in our existing database but once we have installed the new database all the URLs will have changed.

There is no quick way to match the old products with the new products so we would have to manually match all 5k products if we were were to setup 301 rules for the old products pointing to the new products. Of course this would take a lot of time.

So the options are:

1. Is it worth putting in this effort to make the 301 rules?

2. Or are we okay just to delete the old product pages, let the SE see the 404 and just wait for it to index the new pages?

3. Or, as a compromise, should we 301 the old product page to the new category page as this is a lot quicker for us do do than redirecting to the new product page?