I recently created a whole new fitted system structure for a site previously running on Joomla 1.5 CMS. They wanted something more simple and elegant, and their back-end was a mess of modules and plugins and a lot of stuff didn't work.
Anyway, their link addresses were not nice too, like content/compontent/article/id
or similar and worse, and I made a lot nicer structure content_type/category/id-article-name
.
From the day when I launched the site, Google Webmaster Tools keeps coming with more and more 404 broken links, I assume from their indexes of previous page urls.
I don't want to affect their SEO. But I am not sure what to do. The site was built with Codeigniter.
Should I put all important old pages to htaccess file with 301 redirect to new ones?
They had a broken database too, somewhere along the line there primary key for content skipped few hundred digits, so their last article on old site was with id 1080, but they only had 230 articles. This was fixed with the new database and all articles have the correct id, so I can't build additional controllers to handle 301 because I urls are significantly changed. But I can't see adding hundreds of 301 redirect to htaccess file as an optimal solution.
Any suggestions? Thank you all