Changing Page Addresses

[hlbuss]

I'm planning on re-doing the category structure of a website. Three similar categories will be moved into one. What would be more advisable...

Leaving the addresses alone and just linking to the pages from the new category index page?

or..

Changing the addresses to correspond to all new pages in the new category/directory, linking to the new addresses from the category index, then setting up redirects from the old addresses?

[pmkpmk]

A re-structuring is a chance to wipe out all quick&dirty compromises of the past. I recommend to do the cleaning up, and use permanent(!) redirects to point to the new structure.

I did so in huge scale on my main site 3 months ago. PR has temporarily vanished from all inner pages, but has now returned.

[graywolf]

Have one project where I am moving pages from ".asp" to ".html" was thinking of leaving ".asp" pages in place until ".html" were indexed and ranked, and then using 301's in .htaccess. Could this cause any problems?

[pmkpmk]

Why the redirect AFTER the indexing has occured? In consequence this means that visitors coming from a search engine will get old content.

[hlbuss]

Have one project where I am moving pages from ".asp" to ".html" was thinking of leaving ".asp" pages in place until ".html" were indexed and ranked, and then using 301's in .htaccess. Could this cause any problems?

I think this could create risk for a duplicate content penalty. If the whole site is being switched over, you'd basically have two copies of the same site up. Granted it's a small risk, but who knows the algos that are running around these days.

I would use the 301's immediately upon changing over, which is what I think I'm gonna try with my above problem.