Revamped website - new page names

[crouquet]

Hello!
I have recently completely revamped my website. As it took a while, I built the new pages with new page names so the old site could still be up and running. When the new site was finished I republished the old index page as the new one. However I left all the other pages with the new names which I now feel was a mistake. Looking through various threads here to see how to delete old pages so they won't be found by users I'm now not sure what to do for the best:

Should I unpublish the old pages (would I then need to re -submit the new ones to SEs)?
Should I re-name the pages back to the original page names?
Should I redirect the old pages to the new pages and if so, how?

I also want to add a sitemap but obviously need to address the above first.
I'm getting more and more confused and would really appreciate any advice. Thanks for any replies!

Elena
www.lescrouquets.net

[D'son]

Re: Revamped website - new page names

Is there any content on the old pages not on the new that you still want access too? If not rename the new pages with the old page names thus not having to change your links and it will not adversely effect your rankings in the search engines. This will over write them, you could if you want then delete the new pages with the new names from your c-panel to clean things up.

[crouquet]

Re: Revamped website - new page names

Thanks Ed!
I'm now realising the amount of work I'll have to do to revert back to the old page names. In effect the new site has more or less the same content but the navigation bar and all the links within the pages would have to be changed back to link to the original names. As I have a lot of pages and most linking to other pages in addition to the navigation bar, I simply don't have the time right now to start it all over again.
I don't fully understand this yet but would adding a site map for the SEs help get my new pages seen or would they still have to be submitted first?

Thanks again for any replies.
Elena
www.lescrouquets.net

[D'son]

Re: Revamped website - new page names

Create and submit the site map after your site is done and published

[Collectors-info]

Re: Revamped website - new page names

Hi, also sounds like you might not of created 2 another folders called something like "new site english" & "new site french", & then you could of just kept the pages with the same name for the english side of things.
If you are renaming pages? it might also be worth re-linking the language flags to match the page the visitor has come from instead of back to the home page.

[crouquet]

Re: Revamped website - new page names

Hi Chris,
Yes, hindsight is indeed a wonderful thing ........

I did think about your suggestion re the flags directing to the equivalent pages. However at the time ( less so now but still the case for some pages) the French site didn't always have the equivalent page in English so it wouldn't have been consistent. The Dutch translation even more so. Plus I thought that someone wanting to see the site in another language would naturally want to start at the beginning so for these reasons I took the easy option.
I suppose I'll just have to put it down to experience and start redoing every page again.
Thanks anyway.
Hope all is well with you,
Elena
www.lescrouquets.net