I got a question for all you SEO guys out there on design
 

I have a client who wants me to create new WordPress site. Their old site is all HTML and the code is way outdated. They do have some pages that rank pretty high for their keywords. I don't want to ruin their good rankings. My question is, if I create a new site with Wordpress should I leave those high ranking pages up or delete them? I could never have the exact URL string as the HTML page. Would Google or the other SE's nick you for having duplicate content, one WordPress page and on HTML page? Any thoughts on this would be helpful.

Thanks,
:thumbsup

Why can't you have the exact URL as the html page?

You can leave those pages as plain html and make them like landing pages or you can 301 redirect to the site's homepage or to the most relevant page. :2 cents:

L.E. Though if you leave them as standalone pages not linked within the site's structure, it will definitely affect the rankings, so perhaps the 301 redirect would do the trick.

Uh, yes you could. Obviously if you don't know much about permalinks then you probably shouldn't have "clients", no offense of course.

the bold part sounds really strange, unless you have some deep folders (and even then you can do it). However, if you really have issues with that, the 301 redirect other posters mentioned is your answer :2 cents:

Make sure you do the 301 redirects correctly

a lot of knew knowledge in this thread, you techie bastards!

We do what we have to do. :1orglaugh

Migrate everything over and setup proper 301's during the process.

I think he meant that there's no point in the new site's structure to use the same linking system, as in he doesn't want to build the structure judging by the current linking scheme, but by what the client wants in there, so it's not a question of not being technically possible, as far as i read it.

Of course you can have the same linking structure, any linking structure you'd want.

Everyone keeps talking about linking/redirects etc. You have to keep the same page content, same page title etc to preserve the rankings as well. If you are redirecting to a new page, you need that new page to be the same as the old page in terms of content/page title

I heard some other people taking about a 301 redirect so that might be the way I would go. The way they have the old link structure is pretty bad ie: back%20pain%20results.html so there is no reason why I would want to make it similar with the permalinks structure.