New URLs for web redesign -- fear of losing Google ranking?

[Jen Spolnik]

We are currently undergoing a web redesign. Many of our URLs will be changing. We are working about losing ranking in Google since many of our pages have a rank of 5 or so. Is it worth the trouble of putting redirects on some of our old urls to redirect to the new versions, or am I worried about nothing? Not sure how the whole Google ranking thing works!

Thanks for your help!

[Bradley Livermore]

If you're running on apache then it's fairly easy.  In your site's httpd configuration you set up directives.

 

If you have straight forward old URLs then you can do it the real easy way -

Redirect 301 /accreditation_licensing/ "http://www.example.edu/about/accreditation"
Redirect 301 /orlando.aspx "http://www.example.edu/orlando"
Redirect 301 /online-education.php "http://www.example.edu/academics/online-learning"
Redirect 301 /madison/alumni-zone/ "http://www.example.edu/alumni"

That says if someone requests the old URL http://www.example.edu/orlando.aspx then 301 redirect them to the new URL http://www.example.edu/orlando

or if someone requests the old URL http://www.example.edu/madison/alumni-zone/ then 301 redirect them to the new url http://www.example.edu/alumni

 

If you have dynamic URL parameters then you have to build Rewrite Conditions which are a bit more difficult:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /program
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=13
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.example.edu/academics/nursing? [R=301,L]

 

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /program
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=14
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.example.edu/academics/business-administration? [R=301,L]

 

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /program
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=15
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.example.edu/academics/computer-science? [R=301,L]

 

That says, if the URL has /program and it has an ID of 13 then send them to the new nursing page.  The old URL would look like this - http://www.example.edu/program?id=13

If the URL was http://www.example.edu/program?id=14 then 301 them to business administration

 

You do all of this inside of your apache configuration file -

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_alias.html#redirect