transferring to a revised website; how not to experience a drop in seo; use of file paths

Question

i am creating a revised website for a firm that has an existing website. Many of the pages are the same topic and text with a new design. Should i use the same file paths as the prior site to avoid any drop in google or other search engine rankings

Answer 1

Here are some guidelines for a good start: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html

Answer 2

Changing Urls is the last thing you want to do. Only consider it if there are no alternatives.

When ranking pages, search engines also consider incoming links, what sites they come from and what text they have in them. By changing your urls you effectively make all those outside links broken.

Answer 3

If you think that the website would benefit from changing file path (/about-us is alwas better that ?page_id=2), you should do the change and have an http 301 moved permanently redirect from old url to new url. Google will quickly update its index if you do it this way.