Tips on website redesign on site with messy URLs?

[seonubblet]

So I've inherited quite a messy website. It was in drupal and the owner wants it in wordpress. One of the problems is the link paths. Should I try to recreate them exactly? i.e. something/somethingelse/page/ or use redirects (which I'm not confident in doing).

Also, some of the pages end in .html, others in a back slash and others without slahes, there's no consistency.

Do you have any tips in general? I remember an older seomoz blogpost about successful website relaunches (with press releases and mass emails and stuff being sent out on launch to boot).

Thanks!

[MattAntonino]

Sure, you could recreate the /page/ paths pretty easily in Wordpress.  When you set your permalinks, you can easily make those a page that ends with the slash.  ie.

site.com/path/

In Wordpress, that's as simple as creating the permalink to your new page as path.  That becomes site.com/path/

For the site.com/path/index.html ones, 301 redirects should be simple enough.

Redirect 301 /path/index.html http://www.site.com/path/new-permalink/

I'm sure there's a way to ModRewrite that whole thing but I'd be careful not to "catch" the wrong links in that type of bulk work.  It's probably easiest to create a sitemap, recreate what you can and figure out the rest from there.

[seonubblet]

Thank you for your answer Matt, I knew that you could set it easy enough in Wordpress but I was just curious if it's better to try to "accomadate" the old site URLs (It's super messy... because the guy used blog posts to make static pages as well) or if it's better to just make cleaner paths and do redirects instead?

I'm not comfortable doing redirects but I'm sure after reading through a few articles I'll feel more confident actually doing it.

[MattAntonino]

I'm never super-comfortable linking off Moz but if you want to, go Google

data-centric 404

You'll find a great post from SEL that talks about finding which 404 error pages to keep. I would apply a similar methodology to finding which "old" pages to keep and which to redirect generally or just let go.