HELP Me Fellow Warriors - Need Redirect Advice - Will It Kill Me In Google?

[noah.whitmore]

So, I have a question that I could not find the answer to...

I inherited a site that was created with XSitePro, which I can't stand. Because of this, all of the html documents were created with long Title Case File Names. The previous owner did some good linkbuilding and it's ranked pretty well for several big keywords.

However, I'm going to be adding a lot to the site and doing a lot more linkbuilding and SEO and such. I want to rename these html files to lower case and shorten the url's, because it has a few advantages and Title Case is really annoying.

I'm thinking about renaming the files from

http://www.mysite.com/This-Page-Abou...Long-Name.html

to

www.mysite.com/this-page.html

I would use a 301 redirect. It's about 15 pages that are ranked well, but they're pretty important to the site. Do you think it's worth the potential short-lived slag from big G?

I would appreciate any advice. Thanks.

-Noah

[StoneWilson]

From limited experience, it's ok but it might take months to regain the keyword rank, and you must sure you have good enough resources to build backlinks like the previous owner did, or you'd better don't do redirect, afterall, it's risky.