Google Re-Index or multiple 301 Redirects on the server?

[seointern]

Over a year ago we moved a site from Blogspot that was adding dates in the URL's (i.e.. blog/2012/08/10/) Additionally we've removed category folders (/category, /tag, etc). Overall if I add all these redirects (from the multiple date options, etc) I'm concerned it might be an overload on the server?

After talking with the server team they had suggested using something like 'BWP Google Sitemaps' on our Wordpress site, which would allow Google some time to re-index our site.

What do you suggest we do?

[JustinTaylor88]

Personally I would set-up 301 redirects, the load on the server is minimal even on reasonably busy sites.

A 301 will transfer most of the link juice and authority the pages have.

Whereas if you don't redirect, any links directly to the blog articles using the old url's will return a 404, in turn the inbound links will be lost and you will pretty much be starting from scratch with no inbound links to your articles.

Redirect everytime for me, unless there is a good reason not to, such as Panda/Penguin issues

Hope that helps

[seointern]

Would you always do this, even in extreme cases? Say for example you had to 100's of redirects? Would that be overkill?

[JustinTaylor88]

100's or redirects is no big deal from a server load point of view, so personally I would unless there was a good reason not too.

Assuming you believe the ranking factors of the existing pages to be good, I would transfer those factors to the new url by using 301 redirects.

Depending on the structure of the redirects you are doing, you may be able to use regular expressions to simplify the process.

You may want to take a look at the SEOMoz best practices article on redirection if you haven't seen it
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection