Moving to a new CMS

[jathos]

I'm updating my site to a new content management system (CMS). It's a very well established site (since '98) with thousands of inbound links. There's approx. 250 articles on the site. My problem is this:

My current site has its URLs created with mod_rewrite like so:
/article1.html
/article2.html
etc.

but the new CMS has SEF URLs with the keywords included, i.e.
/category/section/article-title-with-keywords/

Option 1:
Should I modify my new CMS to use the same page names (articleXX.html?) so that as far as Google is concerned, nothing has changed on my site? I lose the cool functionality of having keywords in the URL, and I'm hobbled with the bland URLs for the rest of the site's life.

Option 2:
Keep the new SEF URLs with the new CMS, and also edit my .htaccess file so that mod_rewrite redirects all my old articleXX.html URLs to the updated page. Google will index all my articles under two different URLs, the old one, and the new one.

Any ideas out there? Is there a third option I'm missing? Thanks!

[willybfriendly]

I would think that a couple of other points need consideration before making a decision.

1. Do you have a significant number of deep links coming in?
2. Do your old pages need updating/maintenance?
3. Do your old pages rank well on relevant terms?

If yes to these questions you might want to consider leaving them as is and running your CMS "in parallel" as it were.

WBF

[jathos]

I do have a significant # of deep links coming in
The pages don't need maintenance
However, while the pages rank OK, they could be significantly better. My current CMS had no meta tag feature and was badly designed. The "new version" of the pages will have have meta tags, cleaner code, H1-H2-H3s, etc.

I guess Google will eventually pick up these changes as it reindexes the inbound links (the articleXX.html URLs).

So Option #2 is the better way to go?

[willybfriendly]

Yes, I would either redirect (301) or rewrite the old URL's in order to maintain the value of the deep links. I find those deep links to be very helpful - one of the more important tidbits I picked up on these boards.

WBF

[jathos]

Thank you for your advice - much appreciated!