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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