301 or 302?

...an old site needs updated.....

[sandpetra]

I’ve done some shuffling around of pages into different folders. I haven’t renamed any pages, just moved them into their own folders. The reasons why is:
The old site structure was inherited from a very badly designed asp site. We haven’t had a chance to improve things until now. The new structure follows a better logical order.
Forms authentication. This is a feature of ASP.Net that allows you to specify which pages and folders requires user authentication via a config file. Eg I put all profile pages into the /profile folder and then specifed that anything in /profile requires authentication.

If a user tries to access a page requiring authentication without being authenticated, the forms authentication modules intercepts the request and redirects the user to the login page. Therefore any pages within profile/* would reply with a 302 redirect if they were to be crawled.

Examples of page changes:
links.aspx -> contentPages/links.aspx
forgottenPassword.aspx -> authentication/forgottenPassword.aspx

I’m doing the following activities as well:
I have also deleted old unused pages.
I am updating our google sitemap.

It this advisable or should I 301?

[Robert Charlton]

I haven’t renamed any pages, just moved them into their own folders.

You've changed their URLs.... this is renaming them. Without 301s, you will have dupe problems on Google.

Examples of page changes:
links.aspx -> contentPages/links.aspx

Definitely 301. If you've kept them all this logical, the rewrites should be easy to code.

forgottenPassword.aspx -> authentication/forgottenPassword.aspx

I don't know why you'd want these indexed. You might consider a robots noindex follow meta tag, but set a 410 Gone response for the page.

I have also deleted old unused pages.

410 Gone