I’m not sure if this should be posted here…wasn’t quite sure where was best.
I’m looking for any advice/suggestions with the following please…
I’ve been working on a major redesign of our site which required us to use a new CMS (Wordpress). We’ve manually transferred about 300 pages of key content (of approx 15,000). The remainder of the content I am going to leave as an archive.
There is a slight loss of page rank every time you 301 redirect a page (this is to avoid ‘infinite loops’), although I’m not sure it’s as much as that.
But if the URLs are changing, you don’t have a lot of choice in the matter - you can either do a 301 redirect and take a small PR loss, or you can offer no redirect and haemorrhage ranking position as Google gets a slew of 404 errors across your site.
A single 301 redirect on each page is not going to make a huge difference. PR is only one of about 200 factors that Google uses to determine a page’s position in the search rankings, so a slight drop to one of those factors is going to have minimal impact.