301 vs. keeping identical URL

[HashtagHustler]

Hey everybody!

I have a question pertaining to our redesign. The situation is as follows:

/drug-rehab/alcohol-withdrawal-los-angeles gets a decent amount of views on out website, and we would like it to be on our redesigned site.

I was curious what impact, if any, I would see given the two scenarios below.

1. 301 to /alcohol-withdrawal
2. make the new page /drug-rehab/alcohol-withdrawal-los-angeles as well

The second situation is that there are a serious of other pages which don't seem to be of drastic benefit, which I don't feel NEED to be on the website. For example:

1. /post-acute-alcohol-withdrawal-treatment/drug-los-angeles
2. /rehabs-resources/drug-abuse/sub-acute-alcohol-withdrawal
3. etc

It appears to me that the content on these pages is rather similar, and I feel like they don't really say anything special. Can I 301 them to the new page? Should I let them die in the black hat inferno they were made in?

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated! Thanks guys!

[RangeMarketing]

First situation: for both options, in theory, you will be maintaining the same link power, however, I would choose option two. You won't have to worry about GoogleBot crawling the old URL to find the new one. Depending on the keywords you are targeting, you might lose some ground by changing the URL structure. If the old URL structure fits into your new web navigation model, I think you should stick with it to maintain the same results.

Second situation: if you feel that the pages aren't of valuable on their own I would 301 them to the one URL. If they made sense to keep from a user experience perspective you would want to add "rel=canonical" tags pointing to the one URL instead.

Hopefully that clears things up!