Redesign existing websites / worried about urls / mapping

[Socialdude]

Hi Guys,

While redesigning existing websites that will have page name changes such as:

example.com/products to be called example.com/solutions

example.com/about-us to be called example.com/about

should I 301 the old url to the new url.

In the past I have not done this & I'm just wondering from an SEO point of view how bad is this?

(On a scale of 1 to 10 how bad is this not 301ing urls, 10 being really bad & 1 being fine),

Thanks.

[AdoptionHelp]

Not using 301s is about the worst thing you could do. Without a 301, you're basically throwing away all the authority your site currently has.

Use a 301 and you get to keep like 95% of your page authority, and your links will automatically get updated in the SE's when the spiders crawl over your site again.

[Socialdude]

Thanks for the answer I suspected that, I'll go back over existing sites and be sure to 301 sites going forward, cheers.