Would you change these URLs?

live with moderate success or 301 them to new urls containing keywords?

[jaimes]

?, Would you change these URLs

What would you do?
At a crossroads, my keywords are very competitive and my rankings had been very strong for couple years on Google.

In the last couple months they have been slipping and I have been trying more links and content etc, but no help, the question is for the Long term:

Would you take the chance at messing with current moderate success (2nd page) and instead put 301 redirects on all the current pages forwarding them to all newly created URLs to have the keywords in them for category /subcategory/ etc.

Example:

Currently - www.Example.com/proddetail.cfm/CategoryID/123/SubCatID/456/ItemID/789/file.htm

Hypothetical proposed new:
www.Example.com/Category/Brand-Name/Product.htm

It would be a big structural change, but almost everyone who seems to be moving up has the keywords listed in their URL. What do you think? Yes, Def. No, Why....

Thanks in advance for your thoughts?

J

[edited by: tedster at 9:45 pm (utc) on June 10, 2007]
[edit reason] fix formatting [/edit]

[tedster]

Rewriting URLs is not a trivial project. Done poorly, the rewrite can hurt you a lot more than an "ugly" URL does. Also take into account, the presence of a keyword in the file path is only a minor (but still real enough) relevance factor,

I would probably rewrite those examples to be more user friendly, but make a solid plan and try to execute it accurately on the first shot. Remember that rewriting a URL and redirecting the old URL are two seperate steps and you want a plan that includes both.