redirect old URL requests to replacement pages?

[SunnyG]

Hello everyone,
I have a query on URL re-writting. I have a bags website which is almost 4 yrs old. It's doing well in terms ranking [mostly homepage keywords] but the inner pages was not properly defined with products name in urls, page titles and other required area. As far as I know these are important area to define your page so that user as well search bots understand these pages and display in search results when searched.

So my question is, recently re-written urls for all inner pages and updated other details now I want to know what to to do with existing pages ? Should I remove and put 404 or shall I redirect [301] to the new urls from old urls?

Pls suggest.

Thanks

[phranque]

how many urls are involved?

in general it is best to redirect the legacy urls to the relevant new urls, especially if there are inbound links to the legacy urls.
it's not a good idea to redirect a large number of urls to a single url, such as the home page or a category page.

[lucy24]

So my question is, recently re-written urls for all inner pages and updated other details now I want to know what to to do with existing pages ? Should I remove and put 404 or shall I redirect [301] to the new urls from old urls?

The first sentence makes it sound as if you haven't changed the pages themselves, only their URLs. If you did remove the old URLs it would be 410 rather than 404, because they used to exist and you've intentionally removed them. 410 vs. 404 makes a big difference to google's crawling, though it has no noticeable effect on bing. At least not within my small-scale personal observation.

If it's same page, new URL, you would normally redirect. You want your customers to be able to find you from any existing bookmarks or links. Unless you've deliberately renamed the page to get rid of unwanted baggage at the old location. This doesn't seem to be the case here. (Which is just as well, because there are long threads talking about whether this kind of renaming works or not.)

It may depend on what exactly "updated other details" means. Do you want to start from scratch, or keep what you've got and try to improve on it?

[SunnyG]

Phranque and lucy 24 thanks for your reply .

There are 20+ pages and these are product pages.

No I just want to point from old url to new urls like:
A OLD URL - A New URL
B OLD URL - B New URL
and so on....

I have added meta tags as the old pages did not have.

That's what I changed.

Thanks again.