301 Redirect Dilemma - Website redesign

[pulseo]

Hi Guys,

We are redesigning a clients ecommerce site.  As part of the process, we're changing the URL structure to make it more friendly.

I have put together a provisional 301 redirect plan but I'm not sure just how far I need to go with it.  So far I have extract all the pages from the existing site that Google Webmaster Tools says have links pointing at them - this totals 93 pages.  I have matched each page like for like to the new website structure.

My next step was to pull the landing pages report from Google Analytics,  I have extracted the pages that received entrances over the last 6 weeks.  This totals 553, less the redirects I have already done and cleaning up some Google Translate pages I have circa 410 pages left.  Many of these pages has more than 1 URL pointing to that page.

I'm debating how important it is that that all of these remaining 410 pages have individual redirects set up for them one by one.  I have to rule out regex because there is no pattern that makes sense given that I have already set up redirects for the first 93 pages that have external links.

My question therefore is how important are 301 redirects on pages that have no external links and receive less than 10 entrances over a 6 week previous period?

Do I need to 301 every single product on the old site to it's corresponding page on the new site?

Also, I'm  not sure how to treat pages that have mutliple URL's on the old site, the existing URL structure is such a mess that in some instances I have 5 URL's for one product page?  I could feasibly create 5 seperate redirects but is this necessary?

Also what about speed considerations, the server is going to have to load these redirects and it may slow the site down.  I'm sitting at 100 odd so far.

Any answers are most appreciated.

Thanks

Derek.

[MikeRoberts]

Best practices would be to 301 all those pages to their relevant new page. Now, if you're not worried about the traffic going to some of those old pages you could choose to 404 the page and let it die but you'd be missing out on any link equity going to that page... but if there are no external links pointing to them then you only have internal links to worry about (but those are likely all on old pages which no one will see anymore either via 301s or 404s).

As for those products with 5+ URLs on the old site... redirect them to the relevant new page. It doesn't matter that there are 5 URLs redirecting to one if that one page is relevant to all 5 old URLs. I wouldn't worry much about server load either with that amount of redirects and eventually any old listings in the SERPs will update to the newer URL (if relevant for the specific query) instead of constantly sending people to a page they know exists elsewhere.