SEO Affect of changing hrefs to internal pages [duplicate]

Question

We are in the process of moving our blog to a new provider. It was previously hosted on Wordpress and individual blog posts used the format :

mysite.com/year/month/day/slug

On our blog listing page mysite.com/blog, all of the links to individual posts followed this format.

Our new site has a different url structure for individual posts mysite.com/slug. We have built an add on so that if the old url is requested, the page will still show the post, so it is not a broken link, however our listings page does not retain the old URLs and shows the new format.

So the old listing page had something like:

<a href="mysite.com/2019/08/20/tariners.html">Best Trainers</a>
<a href="mysite.com/2019/04/20/shirts.html">Best Shirts</a>

but the new site has

<a href="mysite.com/tariners.html">Best Trainers</a>
<a href="mysite.com/shirts.html">Best Shirts</a>

Will this change to the listings page have a negative affect on the individual posts SEO ranking?

Answer 1

The answer is yes, it will have an impact temporarily on rankings. Even if you do things correctly. You should set these redirects up to be 301 (permanent) redirects to tell Google that these are in fact the same pages as before, just with updated URLs.

You will typically experience a temporary drop in rankings while Google is coming to an understanding of what you are doing but must of the the ranking impacts should be ironed out within a few months.