301 ranking problems within the same domain

What kind of problems have you had

[jakegotmail]

A lot of the 301 issues I have read about by using "search" it seems that they have been 301 redirects from redwidget.com moving to differenturl.com

What kind of problems has the community faced with this type of 301 redirect

current URL
domain.com/order_blue_widget.php

new URL
domain.com/order-blue-widget.php

What kind of problems have you had when making this type of move?

What happens if you don't change all of your backlinks to the new URL?

[steveb]

This is the one thing that has been working great for me. I leave one or two links to the old pages so Google is always reminded of the 301. I assume this will not be necessary sometime in the future, maybe as soon as next week, but for now it seems to me that keeping a sitemap of page changes is a good idea.

[jakegotmail]

Did your PR or more importantly RANKING change at all?

Lets say you have 50 backlinks going to:
current URL
domain.com/order_blue_widget.php

do you need to change all fo the backlinks to your
new URL
domain.com/order-blue-widget.php

[macdave]

I leave one or two links to the old pages so Google is always reminded of the 301

This is essential. If you take down all links to the old URLs, they won't get crawled and Google won't see the 301s. With no incoming links, the old URLs will be relegated to the supplemental index, where they will haunt you until the end of days. (Or until Saint Jagger 3 exorcises those demons...)

[steveb]

You should change all your links to the new ones, except those that you keep to the old pages just so Google keeps track of the 301 forever.

The rankings will change of course, but should recover eventually. Displayed pagerank was fine as of the next update. It won't change immediately though.

[macdave]

Also, any minor ranking boost you might get from changing from underscores to dashes is more than offset by the risk of creating duplicate content, canonicalization, and supplemental problems. Been there, done, that, still hurting.

The Google patent on using historical data to rank pages [appft1.uspto.gov] illustrates a few other reasons why cool URLs don't change [w3.org].

[jakegotmail]

^I understand your PR didn't change until the update, but did your ranking stay the same?

[jakegotmail]

also would anyone suggest 404 as opposed to 301?

[steveb]

I'd suggest waiting until next week to see if Jagger3 does do something to fundamentally alter supplementals. If it doesn't, don't do 404s as the old pages will live forever as supplementals. If Google stops having supplementals live forever, then 404 could be a better way to go.

[g1smd]

The supplemental results are where all the historical linking data is stored... what the interlinking looked like 18 months ago...