Major update to site architecture (outline)-Is Google going to drop?

[bvrob]

I'm working with a lawyer client who has a table-based, outdated site. Her nav links consist of a jumble of topics and static pages in one long sidebar list on the home page. I'm moving her site to Wordpress and I've recommended that she organize the site based on categories that roughly match the topics/keywords she wants to rank highest for in Google.

The site will be much better organized and coded and the URLs for the new launch will be much stronger for SEO by being targeted and coded properly. So the site should rank better after, right? Right???

I know that when Google crawls the new architecture, it's not going to find the expected long sidebar list of internal nav links. It'll find better, more keyword targeted internal nav links. But will that keep the site from getting dropped off page 1?

I'm speaking w/ the client tomorrow and if she's going to drop or get bounced around, I feel like I should prepare her and let her know roughly what might happen. I'm thinking based on my current understanding that I should tell her to expect to be bounced around for a few weeks, but in the end she should rank higher than before.

What would you do/say?

[Hurf]

1. Create 301 redirects from any of the old pages to their equivalent new pages - this tells Google that old content has moved from www.abcdomain.com/page1.html to www.abcdomain.com/category1/page1.html for example. Do that for every page. If there isn't an exact match for the old page - redirect it to an equivalent page where possible. (You can get a wordpress plugin to manage your 301 redirects - if you want to manage/monitor them - but modifying the .htaccess file is better.

You might want to create a spreadsheet or list based on an existing sitemap perhaps of the old url structure and the new one and cross reference them and mark each one as redirected as you create your 301 list for the htaccess file.

2. Resubmitting a new xml sitemap in Google.com/Webmasters may help the changes get picked up a little quicker.

3. Advise the client that 301 redirects can take a few weeks to properly kick in in terms of Google giving them back 90% of the authority they had previously - so you are likely to dip in the rankings for a bit - however, the better optimised site will eventually offset that and take it beyond where it was previously.