maintaining search engine ranking

[rawkman]

I'm working on a site re-design for a client and they are currently ranked second on a Yahoo search result for a certain phrase. I'm probably going to need to change page filenames and stuff but I'm not sure if that will cause any problems with their current ranking.

I'm going to re-use existing meta tags/page titles etc as much as possible so I don't think it'll be a problem, but they are really concerned with losing their ranking and I haven't don't enough SEO to know if it'll hurt their ranking by changing URLs for certain pages.

[bokeh]

I'm probably going to need to change page filenames and stuffThat would be very unwise and is not recommended by W3C. Why would you need to change file names.

[rawkman]

biggest reason is this site has over 300 pages and right now they're ALL in the root and not organized at all.

All the file extentions have to change anyway since their host requires all SSI pages to use .shtml

[bokeh]

biggest reason is this site has over 300 pages and right now they're ALL in the root and not organized at all.

All the file extentions have to change anyway since their host requires all SSI pages to use .shtml
All you need for that is a rewrite rule in .htaccess. (Please don't sa<y they are not using Apache.) The following would forward all .html requests to their .shtml namesake:RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1.shtml [QSA]
Or if you want to change the directory structure at least have a rewrite rule from the old files to an index, but personally I see this change as madness.

[rawkman]

They're using TELUS hosting so I have no idea what capabilities they have. I've been asking for the user login info for a while to test some stuff.

I am planning on putting a custom404 page up to catch any mis-directed links so they get re-directed to either a "sorry, not found, but here's some info..." type of page or just dump them back to the homepage.

[mdoigny]

Leave all the old pages in place (that's really important to keep your rating), but do a permanent redirect to the page that's the most appropriate. An HTTP 301 response is the best choice, but otherwise you could use an http refresh meta tag if you don't have access to the server configuration.
Don't do a redirect to the home page only, since you need to spread your page rank over more than one page. If only your index page has an high ranking, only the keywords of the index page will be used, while other pages could contain useful content too.

[LisaGrimmer]

HI
Don't do a redirect to the home page only, since you need to spread your page rank over more than one page. If only your index page has an high ranking, only the keywords of the index page will be used, while other pages could contain useful content too.
Regards,
Lissa Grimmer

[proinet]

You can find out what server they are on at netcraft.com.

If they are running Apache on a *nix platform, you can use .htaccess to make their .html pages work with SSI.

Here is what you'd put in your .htaccess file:
AddHandler server-parsed .html .htm

If you aren't familiar with the power of htaccess, google it -- there is a ton of info out there for you.

Regards,
Jim Whitesell
Professional Internet
Search Engine Friendly Shopping Cart (http://www.proi.net/search-engine-friendly-shopping-cart/)