Impact of changing directory and link structure

[Andrew303]

I am currently doing a major redesign of a site where most pages have a very good Google Page Rank due to the number of external links pointing to the site.

To group the information in a more meaningful way I have decided to shorten the directory names and change the page names so that:

www.widgets/products_services/widget1.html

becomes

www.widgets/products/widget1/index.html

I plan to redirect the old links to the new ones using Apache mod rewrite. If a user clicks on an old link in Google they will be redirected by the server to the new page.

My only concern is that a lot of these old pages have in excess of 600 external links pointing to them.

Will I see a drop in traffic and rankings if I change the urls, will it even make a difference as long as the redirect occurs on the server side?

[layer8]

I think Google's guidelines suggest using a 301 redirect.

This will redirect old link to new ones and will update on crawls, also your pr will be fully distributed to the new page. It is done by using a .htaccess file within the root directory.