301 Re-Directs - could we be banned?

[Matt Byrne]

Hi All

Relatively new to the site only my second post, just wondering whether I could get soem advice from a number of parties.

I have recently joined a new catalogue company with a website that has had no SEO done on it at all. Having said that a number of the pages have decent SERP's (obvioulsy by luck rather than judgement and probably due to the niche products that they represent)

We are currently re-building the site, fingers crossed to go live approx 10th March. The Homepage URL will not change but effectively due to the platform that the site is being rebuilt on every other "category" and "product page" URL will change.

I have heard a little about the benefits of 301 redirects but wanted to understand some issues given IT resource (which is quite low given the nature of this project).

Basically, we have two options:

1. Spend alot of time and effort re-directing every page that currently exists on our site to the new equivalent page in the new site (using 301's).

2. We don't bother and simply redirect all current pages on our site via 301 simply to the homepage of teh new site.

If we work on Option 2 I understand that we will lose any equity and pagerank we may have had for the ranking pages (I think - can someone clarify).

The issue is that if we go with option 2 that we will actually cause ourselves problems with the likes of Google as we are saying our current page A, B, C.....Z are permanently now all at a single homepage URL. (which is obviously not true)

Can anyone answer my previous questions but also effectively give me the pro's and cons of both methodologies so that I can try and get to the "correct" method to follow.

With IT resource being so low at the moment I will need a compelling argument to not use option 2 and I'm hoping that someone out there may be able to help (that said if option 1 really is not an issue then please say)

With the new site on day 1, we will be building XML sitemaps etc and submitting these to Google/Yahoo in the appropriate manners to hopefully re-index the new site in it's new hierachy, I am just worried that option 2 will not only cause us to lose SERP's (which I believe it would do) but may actually cause further issues that would be a nightmare to mitigate at a later stage.

Sorry to type so much - hope some of you experts will be able to give me some skilled objective viewpoints.

Cheers

Matt

[Bagi Zoltán]

Matt is it different from your previous thread, because if it is the same you shouldn't repost it again.

[Matt Byrne]

Bagi

As I said I am new to all this psoting threads and did not know the protocol. I realised that where I first posted the thread may not be the best place on the forum to get a response and hecne re-posted the thread in two other sections. I did not realise that I was doing anything wrong so please forgive my ignorance

Regards

Matt Byrne