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Hello Vadim, I was aware of changing the permalink structure in WordPress but the problem is their old CMS was really bulky and messy and contained many unnecessary folders and sub folders that I didn't want to recreate on the updated site.

I thought that the best way to do this was through rel=cannonical? So instead of redirecting the old pages to the corresponding URLs I would just need to make sure that each page is under one main URL? I thought 301 redirects were a nono actually. I could be mistaken.

Hello folks, I've redesigned a site completely and I ended up changing their CMS to wordpress as well. So their URLs which mostly ended in .html and folder organization have been thrown completely out the window with wordpress' '/' format. I'm just wondering what the best way is to approach retaining all the site's previous "link juice". What should I be doing here? How do I make sure their organic rankings don't fall? (They've left their previous SEO firm so they can't help me out on this).

Thanks!

Thank you for your answer Matt, I knew that you could set it easy enough in Wordpress but I was just curious if it's better to try to "accomadate" the old site URLs (It's super messy... because the guy used blog posts to make static pages as well) or if it's better to just make cleaner paths and do redirects instead?

I'm not comfortable doing redirects but I'm sure after reading through a few articles I'll feel more confident actually doing it.

So I've inherited quite a messy website. It was in drupal and the owner wants it in wordpress. One of the problems is the link paths. Should I try to recreate them exactly? i.e. something/somethingelse/page/ or use redirects (which I'm not confident in doing).

Also, some of the pages end in .html, others in a back slash and others without slahes, there's no consistency.

Do you have any tips in general? I remember an older seomoz blogpost about successful website relaunches (with press releases and mass emails and stuff being sent out on launch to boot).

Thanks!