: Is redirecting old url to new url a bad idea with respect to SEO? My web application used to generate not so SEO friendly urls. They used to be like this: https://example.com/search?category_id=208

@Hamaas447

If you send the old links to a 404 you will lose all the google juice from the external links that point to every single old pages. The impact will be tremendous on the traffic to the website. It will take time before Googlebot visits your new pages.

If you create a 301 redirect from every old page to every new page, you will still lose a bit of google juice but that would be never as bad as 404.

If you have been able to change your Url, i guess you have some PHP skills. Can't you create a big table, with IDs (ex:208) and the matching friendly url name (ex:metal-processing-and-machine-tool) and query this table to create a 301 redirect to replace the number by the friendly name, every time someone (like a bot) requests an old URL?

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@Connie744

It is not good practice to send old pages to 404, instead redirect to the relevant page.

Understand in this way, if you got so many old URLs and you may not know if other people may have linked etc. So, the best practice is not to have 404 and there should be proper planning to redirect old pages to respective new pages.

Search engines will not apply penalty in this matter. But if you are serious about ranking, it's not good to have 404.

Hope this helps.

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