Restructuring Site - SEO

Question

I am planning to restructure my site slightly which means certain urls will be changing.

I rank quite well for some of these pages in google. What can I do to retain this once I change the url's?

Here is an example of some of the changes:

twistedtime.com/mens-watches.html to twistedtime.com/shop-by/gender/mens-watches.html

twistedtime.com/watch-brands/lip-watches.html to twistedtime.com/shop-by/watch-brands/lip-watches.html

Answer 1

Just 301 redirect the old URLs to the new ones.

Answer 2

You will want to 301 redirect: twistedtime.com/mens-watches.html to twistedtime.com/shop-by/gender/mens-watches.html

and

twistedtime.com/watch-brands/lip-watches.html to twistedtime.com/shop-by/watch-brands/lip-watches.html

Just add a line of 301 redirect code to the header of the old pages.

You lose 10% of your link juice (pagerank) by doing a 301, but the rel="canonical" tag does the same. It's also only supported by Google (not Bing or Yahoo).

If you run an apache server add the following to your .htaccess file and this takes care of the redirect.

Redirect 301 /old/old.html http://www.you.com/new.html

Answer 3

The obvious technical answer would be 301 redirects, but it's my understanding that those would result in PageRank loss. That seems somewhat unavoidable if you're changing URL structures, however.

To mitigate the loss, I'd add URL canonicalization and make sure you're linking to the new pages consistently.