should I redirect webpages after creating new pages?

Hi,

I've had a website I've been building backlinks to but now we are changing the format to an ecommerce solution.

I was wondering, what happens to all my link juice if the urls change on the site?

I.e.

http://www.xxxx.com/keyword1.html - heavily linked for keyword 1
now will be
http://www.xxxx.com/webstore/keyword1.php.


Should I set a perm redirect for all webpages which I have had campaigns on to forward on to the new webpage created?

Thanks,
Rogar

Use a 301 redirect to transfer most of the juice to the new page. Another option would be to use the Apache rewrite module to make the new URLs look like the old URLs.

I'd go with MBW007's second suggestion, one re-write rule and all your old pages can be automatically redirected to your new URL structure without losing your search rankings and page juice. Make sure they're 301 redirects!

It would be ideal to make the new urls appear as the old ones with .htaccess, but if that breaks your ecommerce system for some reason I would do 301 redirects from every old url to every new url, especially if I had done a lot of SEO work and they were ranking already. Have you contacted the ecommerce developer to see if there is an easy way to do it or change the link structure within the e commerce package? You can't be the first person with that question.

The ideal method is for your old site and new site to have the same structure so you can redirect each page of the old site to its equivalent on the new site, preserving most of the link juice for each page.

However, since you're switching to e-commerce, your site structure is likely not the same, so just redirect each old inner page to a unique new page (i.e. don't redirect two old pages to the same new page unless you have to).

After you've redirected every single old page, you will need to redirect the home page. But work from the inside out for maximum preservation.