Multiple questions.

[lost as always]

I am switching over my site from one theme to another. I have about 300 pages and am going through and changing paths for some of them as I replace them i.e.

home/red/realred/redwidget.htm

to

home/redwidget.htm

Question is do I need to do 301 redirects to get Google to spider those pages? Any affect on ad sense if I have both set up while I am making the transition? Until I do the 301’s?

2nd question, the majority of my site is reference stuff. Descriptions and uses, etc of red widgets. If I cross post that info to the message board (bulk of my users) as individual threads I assume that is against TOS? I only show ads to guests but I remember reading there is a gig for duplicate content.

Ok, enough of my stupid questions for the moment. Give me a sec, I will think of more..

[dibbern2]

Are you saying that all those old pages would be "gone"
as SE indexed files? And, that many redirects is even worse.

Please reconsider. I think you're inviting serious search engine trouble.

Good luck.

[spaceylacie]

I recently had a bad 301 re-direct experience. In the long run, I wanted to move the pages and thought, actually still think, that it's for best. But short term it didn't work out the way I expected. I finally just totally deleted the old pages so that they instead point to my 404 custom error page. In the future, despite what I have heard, I will avoid 301 permanent re-directs.

[europeforvisitors]

In the past few months, I've done 301 redirects of 500 or 600 pages within the same domain due to reorganization of my site. I haven't had any problems with Google Search or AdSense as a result (knock on wood).

[lost as always]

the old pages would be deleted, they would get a 404 if I didnt do a 301 redirect.

The new ones are not indexed by a search engine yet but I think it does more harm than good to be 3-4 levels down on some pages. Every pages links to every other so when one gets spidered they all do. My 404 is a site map with a link to every single page in the site.

I would like to get the site right before it gets bigger and it isnt fixable