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Thanks-I based the question on the rankchecker plugin results and I always make sure to log out of google, but I usually don't rely on my own search results. RankChecker shows either the same rankings over the last 2 months or improvement but actual visiters have dropped dramatically. I still need to go through the data in the webmaster central about actual impressions and all that.

1. Create 301 redirects from any of the old pages to their equivalent new pages - this tells Google that old content has moved from www.abcdomain.com/page1.html to www.abcdomain.com/category1/page1.html for example. Do that for every page. If there isn't an exact match for the old page - redirect it to an equivalent page where possible. (You can get a wordpress plugin to manage your 301 redirects - if you want to manage/monitor them - but modifying the .htaccess file is better. You might want to create a spreadsheet or list based on an existing sitemap perhaps of the old url structure and the new one and cross reference them and mark each one as redirected as you create your 301 list for the htaccess file. 2. Resubmitting a new xml sitemap in Google.com/Webmasters may help the changes get picked up a little quicker. 3. Advise the client that 301 redirects can take a few weeks to properly kick in in terms of Google giving them back 90% of the authority they had previously - so you are likely to dip in the rankings for a bit - however, the better optimised site will eventually offset that and take it beyond where it was previously.