Redevelop site without losing business

Hi,

I am trying to win a job redeveloping an ecommerce site,the client loves my ecommerce system but as a web only business they are concerned that their site will initially suffer badly in the switch to a whole new site structure. My ecommerce system has been optimized for seo so this really shouldn't be an issue, i have also offerred to put in 301 redirects within the system for all his most important category pages and anything else that has good rankings for his major keywords. He is convinced though that unless he retains the precise URL's he currently has then he will be penalized by the search engines and that 301's will not be sufficient. I am a developer first and foremost and everything i have read says that 301s are what you should do in this context but he is demanding the category pages at least retain the exact URLs he has now. I'm pretty sure i could mask some of my URLs using mod rewrite to what he wants but the question i want to ask is whether he is actually right ? Considering that all the content on the page will have been reorganised anyway and that the search engines will know that oldpage.html is now to permanently be found at newpage.php then does the actual url of newpage.php really matter anyway ? would love to hear about any scenarios where people have had the same discussions with clients / experiences with their own site etc..

thanks guys.

Well you are both right.

A 301 is the right way to go but it is not instant. In the Search Engines eyes it can take a while. When I sorted out my brother-in-laws site the equity didn't pass over for 6 months.

I sort them out from the start so they are not an issue for me as an after thought. Also other people have reported the same. But it may only take a couple of weeks it depends on other factors, trust, equity and size of the site.

Now the problem is due to the fact that the equity is suspended for this time frame then yes some pages will lose rankings until it is sorted out.

If it is possible to keep the URLs exact I would keep them. There is no reason to change them unless you have to.

If the mask is set up properly then it should not matter the search engines will still see .html page and not .php.

How are you masking it?
I would personally get the server to parse all html files as php files thus keeping the url, and file extention, the same.

Jaza

Had a similar problem previously in that the client wanted to rebrand the site and change names and URLs. I advised him he may lose some previous traffic but as he was into website development himself he felt the 301 redirect would work fine. I did as he wished and he lost a lot of traffic to start with but then it did come back, after about 4 months he was back near the top of search engines like before.

I agree with the previous post in that unless you have to chnage the URL then don't but if you do then in the end it should work out fine.