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Sadly I did change the internal linking structure, so that internal links now point to new urls not the old ones. The good news is that even with changing the internal linking structure, Google seems to be keeping abreast of it all. The number of urls indexed has now jumped - in a day - from 939 to 1024, so good old Google is clearly keeping up with the changes. Looks like my fears were ungrounded. Yay

That's fair. I get that you're not recommending it personally - but it does seem popular with consistently good feedback from people, so I'll give it a go

Thanks Ryan, that's a weight off my mind. I'll definitely take up your advice on the sitemap generator, too. Thanks for the recommendation - I'd seen a few around, but wasn't sure - it's great to be pointed in the right direction!

I've got a handcoded site with around 1500 unique articles and a handcoded sitemap. Very old school.

The url structure is a bit of a mess, so to make things easier for a developer who'll be making the site database-driven, I thought I'd recategorise the content. Same content, but with new url structure (I thought I'd juice up the urls for SEO purposes while I was at it)

To this end, I took categories like:

/body/amazing-big-shoes/
/style/red-boots/
/technology/cyber-boots/

And rehoused all the content like so, doing it all manually with ftp:

/boots/amazing-boots/
/boots/red-boots/
/boots/cyber-boots/

I placed 301 redirects in the .htaccess file like so:

redirect 301 /body/amazing-boots/ http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/

(not doing redirects for each article, just for categories which seemed to make the articles redirect nicely.)

Then I went into sitemap.xml and manually overwrote all the entries to reflect the new url structure, but keeping the old dates of the original entries, like so:

<url><loc>http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/index.php</loc>
    <lastmod>2008-07-08</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority></url>

And resubmitted the sitemap to Google Webmasters.

This was done 4 days ago. Webmaster said that the 1400 of 1500 articles indexed had dropped to 860, and today it's climbed to 939.

Did I adopt correct procedure? Am I going about things the right way? Given a little time, can I expect Google to re-index the new pages nicely?

I appreciate I've made a lot of changes in one fell swoop which could be a bit of a no-no... ?

PS Apologies if this question appears twice on Q&A - hopefully I haven't double-posted