301 redirects - Changing an entire site, is it possible?

[gutabo]

Greetings,

We're changing our entire site(design and navigation wise) and we were wondering what would be the best approach to keep our pages indexed and our page rank/links intact. Are 301 redirects the way to go? Like, we have a page URL like "/our-products.php" and on the new navigation it'll be something like "/products/list.php". Our contetn is going to be almost the same(we're updating it too but not that much).

Thanks in advance!

[tedster]

Yes, it's very possible and 301 redirects for any content you are keeping is the way to go. You may find a lot of guidance from this discussion: Site Re-launch Checklist [webmasterworld.com]

To succeed requires technical exactness in many areas if you hope to avoid an extended loss of search traffic.

[g1smd]

Rule order will be very important. No request should ever result in a multi-step redirection chain. This will need very careful design and very thorough testing.

[gutabo]

Wow, thank you so much guys! I'll take a look at that checklist and will be back if things get ugly, hopefully they will not!