Website Redesign - How to Minimize Impact?

[beautykat]

We will be launching our new website with a new design this weekend. In this new design, we have removed and renamed some path and html files. How do we minimize impact from Search Engines and message boards currently linking to our website?

We have thought about the following to-do,

1) Redirect those old pages to their new destination.

2) Create a robot.txt to exclude all old pages during indexing.

3) Resubmit to search engines

Are we missing any critical elements? Thanks!

[leadegroot]

I normally 301 until I don't see any bot hits on the old pages in the logs anymore, then work on getting Real People to update their links and bookmarks. I create a page at the old location that returns a 404 but has a link to the new page and a description asking them to update their bookmarks or inform the linker. I also contact the linkers myself, where possible too.