New website with slightly new urls

[GlenBOB]

Hi we recently designed our website in work and changed some of the urls.

the old site used to be http://www.example.ie/contact-us.htm now it's is http://example.ie/get-in-touch

The problem we are having is with sitelinks (the ones auto generate in the serp) ie: about, contact us, team etc etc. Once cliked on, these OLD links are all going to 404 pages because of the change of url.

Help with this would be greatly appreciated - I was thinking of blocking these old sitelinks in google web master.

[john4math]

You need to 301 redirect all these old URLs to their new counterparts.  If you just block them, people who have linked to these pages across the web will be getting 404 pages, so you'll be losing potential customers.  Also, you won't be passing the Pagerank along.

[EGOL]

Do not change URLs unless you have an extremely good reason and fully understand how to minimize losses of rankings, traffic, linkvalue, anchor text value, bookmarks, tweets, likes, and more.

Lots of people have lost years of link equity and a fortune of money by changing their URLs.

[GlenBOB]

But lots of these url changes were unavoidable & with new services in the company we had to alter/change some of the urls.

So what do you suggest for a redesign then? Urls must be exactly the same as previous..

[Maximise]

As John says you need to 301 redirect all your old URL's to the new URL's.

We have recently done a complete restructure of our site (the old site was very badly designed) and have had no loss in traffic or rankings. You need to make very sure that all your 301's are set up correctly (so do plenty of testing) so that you do not lose any incoming page rank from other sites.

[GlenBOB]

Ok Thanks guys for the information, cheers John