Google Buzz is just like facebook, you follow people, they follow you, you create a status update, upload videos and pics and then your followers can comment.  I personally find it more efficient to have everything in one place. The problem is getting everyone else to move over to gmail. I’ll do my best.

Not having these redirects can be fatal to a website, from an indexation standpoint. Let’s say you were a small website with 500 URL’s and you had 385 indexed. If you were to completely restructure your url system, without 301 redirects. Overtime, Google and the other major search engines would stop displaying your URL’s as they would most likely return a 404 error.

Let’s use the example of a made up boat company xyzboatco.com. We decide to make our structure more effective with less folders and change xyzboatco.com/boats/engine/speed to xyzboatco.com/speed-boat-engines. If your initial URL was on the first page of Google and you didn’t redirect it to the later URL, overtime Google would drop that link. Google would still be sending traffic to the old link and it would result in a 404 error, which is an SEO no no.

If you are considering a URL overhaul it is absolutely imperative that you create a 301 redirect for your website, so you don’t lose all the hard work that you have put into your site.