tedster - 8:06 pm on Sep 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

It's been a few months since I worked on a url rewrite project, so things may have changed a bit. But my experience was that, long term, it was always a positive step. Short term, a site with anything lower than a PR7 Home Page may experience a few bumps on the way to improvement. If the traffic matters a whole lot, have a PPC budget waiting in the wings, just in case, to soften the bumps. Once it's done, you're in great shape for the future. You can have urls that don't expose your underlying technology - no ".cfm" extensions!

It's essential to get the technology right in your rewrite scheme, and there are several pitfalls.

1) Poorly configured, you may open the door to duplicate urls for the same content. I've seen rewrite schemes where the url still keys off a product or category number as well as including the keyword. Problem was that as long as the record number was present, any old word or typo could replace the kyword in the url and the url would resolve, That's a time bomb.

2) Remember that there are two steps to address: a. get the new urls to resolve and b. 301 redirect the old urls

3) I found it more effective to do a ranking, traffic and backlink study and then only redirect the key urls, letting the rest go 404. That approach seemed to give the quickest "recovery" time in Google I ever achieved. In fact, that site never saw a dip in Google traffic, and then rankings improved quickly.

But definitely double check and triple check the technical set-up for the urls. Make sure the http headers have the correct status codes. Make sure you cannot deconstruct the intended urls and still see them resolve with a 200 OK.