Will thousands of redirected pages have a negative impact on the site?

[Dino64]

A client site has thousands of pages with unoptimized urls. I want to change the url structure to make them a little more search friendly.

Many of the pages I want to update have backlinks to them and good PR so I don't want to delete them entirely. If I change the urls on thousands of pages, that means a lot of 301 redirects. Will thousands of redirected pages have a negative impact on the site?

Thanks,

Dino

[DarinPirkey]

Simple answer is no, but.....

Make sure that your 301s are not more than 3 redirects from the original post.  For example, if you have a page called pageid=44 and it's about red apples, then make sure that the 301 goes to /red-apples (meaning the exact page you want it to go to)

Matt Cutts has a great video on this on WMT.

This should really answer all your questions but if you have any more then please feel free to ask.

[gmk1567]

There won't be any issue. But you need to check with system admin if your server could be able to handle thousands of redirects. Most of the time, reducing duplicates from the current site and using regular expression for 301 redirects will reduce the number of 301 redirects considerably.

[EGOL]

You hope to get a tiny bump out of changing the URL ?

But, you are going to waste some linkjuice in redirecting....

and create thousands of htaccess lines that must be processed...

and you are worried that tons of redirects are going to cause a problem....

How much do you think an optmized URL is worth in the search engines?

I don't think that it's worth a whole lot.

[Dino64]

I do not know how much an optimized url is worth. I also do not know how much link juice would be lost by redirecting. I wasn't aware that any would be lost. If so, then I need to consider if leaving them alone is the best option at this point. Definitely do not want to do more harm than good.

[DarinPirkey]

There is some loss in PR with 301 but it's about linking in the future too.  Is it easier for someone to link to example.com/red-apples or example.com/?page_id=53.

I personally don't think it's a waste of time and it certainly helps with UX.

[reynoldsdesign]

I'm doing the same thing with a site I'm rebuilding. The page structure is changing to make it more logical to users and hopefully google. I've changed the urls on my site a couple of times over the years and I haven't noticed much change in the short-term and a considerable boost in the long term.

The site I'm building has hundreds of pages with tons of 301 redirects as well.

[AgentsofValue]

I've never had a problem on creating a large number of redirects on a site before.  It's something that happens quite a bit, for instance if a site is moving to a a site to a new domain or a new CMS, where it can often be very difficult to exactly recreate the same URL structure.

There's no limit to the number of redirects, just the number of hops.  If the site had existing redirects in place, you might want to update those existing redirects as well, to point to the new final destination.