What is the best way to fix legacy overly-nested URLs?

[ThemeParkTourist]

Hi everyone,

Due to some really poor decisions I made back when I started my site several years ago, I'm lumbered with several hundred pages that have overly-nested URLs. For example:

/theme-parks/uk-theme-parks/alton-towers/attractions/enterprise

I'd prefer these to feature at most three layers of nesting, for example:

/reviews/alton-towers/enterprise

Is there a good approach for achieving this, or is it best just to accept the legacy URLs as an unfixable problem, and make sure that future content follows the new structure? I can easily knock together a script to update the aliases for the existing content, but I'm concerned about having hundreds of 301 redirects (could this be achieved with a single regular express in .htaccess, for example?).

Any guidance appreciated.

Thanks, Nick

[AlanMosley]

I would accept it, google does not mind, it is said Bing does count the folders as a signal, but with modern routing engines like MVC along with friendly urls, it is common to have many sections to a url, and Bing i assume will take that into account.

[irvingw]

there's no problem with having hundreds of 301's.

having /theme-parks/ twice in the url is slightly spammy, but probably better than your second example where you don't have "theme parks" even once in the url. I would make it   /theme-park-reviews/ unless your domain name already have "theme parks" in it.

If you're having great rankings with the current pages you may want to just leave the legacy pages and work on new structure for posts going forward, but if it's not brining you a ton of traffic that your business depends on, then I would 301 them to the new structure, should be fine and you could always revert if you see negative effects.

[AlanMosley]

Except that hundrends of 301's means hundreds of link juice leaks

[ThemeParkTourist]

Thanks Alan and Irving, your responses are both very helpful. In reality, these pages have relatively few external links pointing to them compared to other sections of the site, so I think I will opt to redirect them. The newer sections of the site have a nice clean URL structure and good on-page optimization, so I think it's best to bite the bullet and move the older pages over to a new system.