Hello,

I am about to redesign my companies website to make the site more SEM friendly. My question is I will have to rename a lot of the files during the redesign because we are using a different scripting language and the current naming convention is very outdated. They currently use dynamic pages with .aspx and we are moving to all html and .asp files for scripting.

What is googles suggestion when it comes to this? What is your opinion for the best practice? Our ranking is an average of about 10 now.

1) Redesign the site and delete old links from Google using the removal tool while bidding on and putting energy toward building the rank of your new webpages?

2) Redesign the site and keep two copies - the new version with the new name and an older page with the new design but no link to it - in case someone searches for our keyword and still finds an old page that is already indexed? Slowly letting the old links die out.

I don't understand this process. I don't want them to visit an older page that is already indexed by google - per say - because the new design will have the same content but different named pages for long term search success.
I don't want to get penalized and I don't want to hurt our ranking, I only, ofcourse, want to improve it but do it ethically and correct, as well.

Sorry if this seems elementry to most of you. This is my first job out of college so still learning a lot of the roots.

Thank you for your time