Newbie SEO Question! Rewrite url

Hello,

im working on a e-commerce site, some of the product names use hyphen and slashes, the product name appears in the url, so in the url %344de replaces the hyphen and the slashes......does that affect my ranking with search engines? also if i rewrite product names to not contain dashes or slashes and update my website would that harm me in anyway? should i do a 301 redirect for old url containing dashes to new url without dashes?

I would just drop all the hyphens and slashes from the product names.
Google will re-index all the new subs and it will work out much better.

All of the rest of the site will be unaffected, so that is what I would do.

don't forget to 301 redirect the old urls...

so drop the hyphens and slashes from product names and do a 301? is there any other options? i have to edit like 1200 products!!

Can you import/export your products? If so, just do a find and replace on the product name column of your export file, then re-import. Voila.

Depending on the age of the site, and if the products have been indexed/rankings, i'd say it was imperative to create the 301 redirects in your .htaccess file.
Niksa