Redirects what to do ?

When I rebuilt my site I didn't pay close attention to the structure of the old one. I didn't mimic the old sites hierarchy of links.

The new link structure is longer and more complex but it allows me to branch off related items in a sane human readable way.

Product listings can be cross linked to companies, articles or any other type of content via Drupals taxonomy system and the link text will still look like a directory tree.

Old version     www.notascoolasitseems.comt/gamepads/

New Version  www.notascoolasitseems.com/product-listing/cat/gamepads/

The problem with the links not matching is that Google had already indexed the old Joomla version of my site and it was slowly rising in rank. Google was sending me regular traffic until I took the site down to work on the new layout using Drupal. Now if people reach my site via Google they get a 404 page because the links are out of date.Google says all my previously indexed pages are "unreachable" and even though I have submitted new site maps Google still tries to crawl the old pages. So what should I do ?

My first thought was to use Googles webmaster tools and submit a request to have all the old pages removed so I can start fresh... probably not a great idea.  I could use a robots.txt to block those phantom pages being spidered ? A large well trafficked site wouldn't do that so there must be another option.

I thought about it while I was trying to make the site more user friendly.

I was getting a few users hitting the 404 page from the old Opensearch I had set up and from Google .

As a quick fix I set the 404 page of the site to search for the key words in the URL that users were trying to reach, if only one result came up they would be redirected to that page .

So if you were trying to reach www.notascoolasitseems.com/keyboards/logitech-g19

which is not a valid URL on this site. It would hopefully forward you to the  Logitech G19 product page. It works some times and is a better alternative for people than a 404 page.

After I set this up I realized that I could probably set up redirects for the old URLs and point them to the new ones, I think you can also do it with a code that indicates to search engines it has been permanently moved. ( 301 ? I have to look it up)

So that is what I am going to do unless I find a better solution.

_{( if you added the old search to your browser you should remove and re- add it , I updated it yesterday. Sorry about that  you can find it here)}

 _{Uuugh I hate this keyboard, I wrote this blog entry earlier, it was funny, insightful , a literary masterpiece but due to the @#$@# keyboard shape I accidentally hit Ctrl instead of shift while typing. I lost the lot.}