How to restructure my blog's categories and move 160 categories pages?

[Chewit]

I have a problem and thought that maybe you people could help me out here. I have a WP blog with +160 categories, all indexed by Google. However, the thing is that I want to make them child categories, by moving them into a main category. I have many reasons for this, like it's not good to display +160 links on all pages, I want to expand the blog to cover a wider topic and it starts to screw up the design quite a bit.

Now, is it enough to do a 301 on all categories and everything will be fine or will the site take a dive in the serps? Maybe you have some other suggestion on how to do this properly?

Thanks!

[tedster]

Essentially the 301 is the right tool, and you're doing a good thing with this kind of restructuring. Yes there could be a rankings hit, but as the highway department used to say, it's "a short term challenge for a long term improvement"

If you can choose a couple of current categories to repurpose as a "parent" that should help - as opposed to making all the existing ones into a child category.