Are you redesigning your site? If so, pay attention to this simple discussion from Google about redirects and here are some tools to help you not lose any of your good Google search engine placements.
So, what happens if you are redesigning your site and you have a page in your old site that rocked Google search and came up #1 in the list when searching something like “business coaching”? Consider the old page is at http://mysite.com/bizcoaching.html and the new site the page changes to http://mysite.com/services/biz-coaching/. Well, you could lose your #1 Google ranking for this page if you don’t setup 301 redirects telling Google that:
http://mysite.com/bizcoaching.html —now lives at—>http://mysite.com/services/bizcoaching/.
When using WordPress, a good plugin to mange this is “Redirection“: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
See Google’s discussion below about their take on redirects: