Need to change urls. How will google respond

My site is about 7 months old. I need to change my URLs to use keywords

[adnovice88]

I have a 7 month old site. I was using short form product names for my files ( and therefore urls also). Now I want to change them to proper product names for keyword based urls.

Also, I am redesigning my pages.

Should I make incremental changes or should I change in one go, everything. Will Google penalise me for such sudden change?

I am registered with Google Sitemaps. Will submitting the new sitemap help in not getting penalised?

[Quadrille]

If your site is only seven months ago, any large structural changes could be catastrophic - certainly not worth the risk for the infinitessimal gains you just might make by renaming files.

By all means adopt a new policy for any news files you create; but leave the existing files alone unless there's a good reason to change.

Also, be sure the method you choose is better than your existing method before you do further damage!

[adnovice88]

Thank you Quadrille.

I think, I will follow your advice and only use the new url format for new files and will keep the old ones as is.

[Bewenched]

You could do a 301 re-direct to the new files from the old. Google does appear to be following these although ranking will go down for a while.

[Quadrille]

bewenched: You are not wrong - but with a seven month old site, there is a serious risk of going back to square one with major site re-orgs.

A new site's hold on Google is fragile; best to avoid disruption for the first year, or thereabouts.