Site Rebuild - should I change URLs with capitals and underscores to lowercase & hyphens?

[surfgatinho]

I'm currently rebuilding one of my main sites in Drupal. It was getting kind of sprawling and hard to maintain. It has been a bit of a challenge getting the functionality in place, but is pretty much there.

Now, this would seem like a prime opportunity to rationalise my URLs and have them all lowercase and hyphenated. However, making a change like this, which will effect many of my main pages, scares me. Many of these pages date back years and have plenty of authority, Wikipedia links etc.

Obviously I'd put 301s in place, but from what I gather there is still a small SEO cost for this and I operate in a competitive field.

So, has anyone done this and had positive (or at least not negative) results, or should I just keep the URLs the same, although this requires extra work.

Thanks,
Chris

[netmeg]

Is there some reason you have to change all of them at once, or can you just 301 some of them and test the waters?

[surfgatinho]

Is there some reason you have to change all of them at once, or can you just 301 some of them and test the waters?

That's not a bad idea. I'll try and restrain my impulse to get rid of all the ugly old URLs and keep an eye on things...

[dipper]

With any big change like this there is risk - and the answer depends if you think it's a worthwhile change. Does the new url structure help with CTR? will it be more intuitive?

If you do, then any redirected/changed URL will drop in the rankings, and *hopefully* return to the same rank on the new URL (or it might be a straight swap if you are lucky). Even with testing bit by bit like netmeg said, some pages might drop but never return to their previous ranking.

Changing site framework + changing URL's both at the same time means you will never 100% know whether it was the change in framework or change in URL that affected rankings. If a drop occurs was it the copy being in a slightly different spot, or the change in 500 internal URL's? -> you won't know.

It has been said a few times by Googlers that internal 301's transfer 90-99% - risky?

imho - keep the URL's as it is for now, change one thing at a time, being the framework, then revisit the URL's in 6 months once the new framework site has been reindexed, rankings stabilised, and you can tackle one thing at a time. Then you can implement netmeg's sage advice.