260k 301 redirects

[mylittlepwny]

Hello,

I just found that some of the urls on my  site have both ugly characters and some other things I'd like to fix (such as ---- into a single - )

After some local tests i've seen that If i leave some imperfections there will be 48k different urls  on the other hand if the renaming procedure is strict i'll have around 260k out of 2.3M urls to be renamed.

If I'm going to do this I'll create new canonicals meta tag and redirect old urls with 301 headers  to the new location. The content will not change.

My big doubt is SEO wise, I know that I'll have better urls, but aren't those too much redirects on a single day?

what would you do if you wish to have shipshape urls and know some of these are crap?

thanks

[SEO5Team]

As mentioned in an earlier post today, you can have as many 301's as needed however the best practice to redirect them to related new pages on the site.

Matt Cutt's video here. 

[irvingw]

I don't think it's a problem providing all the links on your site are up to date with the new URLs and the sitemap.xml's are also up to date.

Google will respider and reindex your site with the new URLs and drop the old ones. You only need to keep the pages which have external links pointing to them 301ing. All other should just get reindexed and Google won't report hundreds of thousands of 301's if the URLs in your code are all up to date. You don't want your site to have a navigational structure that consists of 301's, and you definitely don't want to daisy chain 301's.