Contemplating change to Squirrel shopping cart system

Consequences for SEO of altered URLs?

[NigelT]

I am looking to update my rather old website, and I very much like the look of the Squirrel shopping cart.

This is a PHP/MySQL cart, and I am concerned about any change to the URLs on my site, which have remained the same for years, and are generally quite well ranked on Google.

The Squirrel web site says this:

"SEO URL feature allows you to remove query strings from category and product URLs:
eg. http://www.example.com/store.php?crn=154&rn=87&action=show_detail
replacing them with more meaningful information:
eg. http://www.example.com/products/custom-printed-t-shirts"

My web pages are standard html with URLs like this:
http://www.mysite.com/my-product.html
http://www.mysite.com/my-second-product.html

My questions are:

1. Am I right in thinking that I am not going to be able to retain exactly the same URLs?

2. If this is the case am I going to lose the ranking I currently have with Google?

3. I have read about redirection, but am not quite sure what it means. Can I keep the existing pages so that they will continue to be ranked on Google, and somehow automatically redirect customers to the new pages?

4. If so, how do I do that?

Thanks for your help!

[edited by: lorax at 3:24 am (utc) on Feb. 6, 2009]

[NigelT]

Any thoughts, anyone?

[Wlauzon]

It was one of many looked at and rejected for some forgotten reason in this thread [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: Wlauzon at 10:11 pm (utc) on Feb. 6, 2009]