Site Redesign - Some Article URLs Changing... Google Issues?

[mftpg]

Hi All,

Have been working hard on a brand-new site design following some excellent advice from a post here on PAW (sadly the original post was a victim of some turkish hackers)

Some of the older articles on my site had spaces in the URL (came out as %20 in the links). Have decided I'd like these cleaned up and was about to ask my developer to make them sort, sweet and just include the main keywords.

My question is this - if we change the URL will Google see these as brand new?

I'm Thinking 'yes' and a little worried about my own articles being viewed as 'duplicate content'... has anyone come across this issue before and if so how was this dealt with?

There are a couple of inbound links to specific pieces that we are looking at but this is not a great concern, more worried about being penalised for duplicate content or losing my ranking for some long tail keywords related to specific articles - hopefully any temporary hit on those rankings will be worth it in the longer-term but some solution would be great!

Feedback / assistance much appreciated.

Thanks, Mark

[kaus]

I belive using a 301 redirect will keep the links that you have gained and you wont get penalized for duplicate content

[mftpg]

Thanks Kaus, Just looked it up and that should do the trick.

These computers baffle me in general!

Thanks, Mark

[haynesey]

the problem i had like a week ago. I used 301's, should work fine.