Switching to another CMS with different permalink structure, how not to lose organic traffic and Google rankings? Urgent Please!

[merkal2005]

One of my customers is in online jewellery sales business and they are going to change their CMS; the problem is there is no co-relation between URL permalink structure of the current CMS and the new one. What should we do so that we don’t lose our current organic traffic (also Google rankings) coming from indexed URLs in Google due to permalink structure change ?

Typical example:

Current URL: http://www.abc.com/pirlanta-nedir,AR-3.html

The new URL is going to look like this: http://www.abc.com/tek-tas-pirlanta-ar-4.html

[JonathanLeplang]

For me, you've no choice : you've to use 301 redirection from all your old url's to the new one

[merkal2005]

Thanks Jonathan, I found this as a guideline for 301 redirection: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

The thing is their website also have on page SEO errors such as duplicate page titles, duplicate content on different product pages etc. Shall we correct them all before moving to another URL structrure? Does that make any sense? Or building a correct on page SEO structure on the new CMS would be okay?

[JonathanLeplang]

No, if you use 301 redirections, you don't have to correct the old pages.

It's says something like that : "Hey Google, doesn't care anymore about this page, this (the new one) is the page to care about. You can transfert PR,... from the old page to the new one"

[merkal2005]

Okay great, thank you so much Jonathan

[MichaelBorgelt]

100% agree on the 301 redirect strategy.  The best execution is to 301 redirect each page to the new page on the new site.  If you have a TON of pages and can not create a 301 redirection rule for every single page you should at least 301 redirect the proper directories to each other.

One thought is...since you will be doing this 301 redirect why not make the NEW urls user/keyword friendly?  Also maybe build some directory structure to the site.  Hopefully you will be doing his but just thought I should mention it.