URL structure: 301 redirect or leave as is?

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

Hello,

My website, www.coloringbookfun.com is very old and authoritative, but the URL structure is terrible.

If you check out some of our subcategories such as http://www.coloringbookfun.com/Kung Fu Panda

and individual printables such as http://www.coloringbookfun.com/Kung Fu Panda/imagepages/image2.html

You can see that they aren't optimized. I am curious to know the pros and cons of fixing the URL structure and 301ing them to the new optimized url.

Will 301ing lose authority and backlinks for the sites pages? Does optimizing the url structure outweigh losing the authority/backlinks?

[StreamlineMetrics]

I would recommend optimizing the URL structure and 301ing the old URLs to the new ones. The amount of link equity lost (which is quite minimal) by 301ing the ugly URLs to the new URLs will be outweighed by the benefits of using a better URL structure in the long term.

[stever999]

Completely agree, it will be a lot of work if you have a high number of pages but definitely worth the effort in the long run!