We have done many website redesigns before for companies looking to bring themselves into the 21st century. Most of them have low page rank when we are handed the project, so it is usually not a big concern of ours to maintain page rank.
However, we have recently obtained a client that is coming from a PHP-based architecture (we are a Microsoft .NET house), and one of the client's main concerns is the loss of their google page rank. Obviously the pages that have a high page rank have PHP extensions.
My questions are as follows:
Will a 301 redirect maintain page rank for each page, or is there something else we need to consider?
Since there are hundreds of pages, is there a nice "industry-standard" way of performing multiple 301 redirects? We are thinking of doing some URL rewriting of the PHP pages and performing the 301 redirect in the web form that we're redirecting to, but before we do this, we want to make sure there's not a better/cleaner way to do this.
Are there any other considerations we should take into account when dealing with a site of this magnitude with this amount of SEO success?
Any help, as always, is appreciated!