AnonyMouse - 9:09 pm on May 13, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hi,

I've got a site which has about 800 pages, currently broken down into various sections (news, reviews, forums, etc).

What I haven't done is provide a meaningful navigation that relates to obvious themes WITHIN those sections.

Rather than use the usual "widget", I'm going to use something more relevant...let's say, "cars". So, I have a car forum, car reviews, car news etc etc.

This means that I have a structure that relates to what kind of content it *is*, rather than what the content is *about*:
Site->Forums->Ford->Mustang
Site->Reviews->Ford->Mustang
Site->Ads->Ford->Mustang

But really, my users think in terms of exclusively "Ford" OR exclusively "Honda", etc...so really, I want to tie together the "Ford" related sections across my site, using a pathbar like so:

Cars->Ford->Mustang->Forums
Cars->Ford->Mustang->Reviews
Cars->Ford->Mustang->Ads

The question is, and thank-you if you've made it this far, should I

(a) map a pathway onto the existing url structure, i.e. the pathway will NOT resemble the urls,
or
(b) redirect the old urls to a new url structure which resembles the pathway?

The first option is probably easier, just need to knock up a pathway module, and I can leverage all the existing urls. However, will I lose some SEO benefit from having the pathway match the urls?

I hope that made sense...Many thanks in advance for any replies!