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.
