Should I do some kind of redirect to point to the new links?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Tony Giovanni: Hi. My first time here so I am not sure if this is where I ask a question. I have an e-commerce website that recently updated and can now change our URLS from ugly php... site.com/index.php?getpage=store&getsec=catalog&page=category&cid=3&theme=7 to something clean like site.com/shop/bags/brown. Should I do some kind of redirect to point to the new links? If so, what kind?
  
  Thanks for your help.
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  Jim Munro: Hi Tony, this is the right place. :)
  
  I am not an expert but I think this is a decision that is best made when designing a new site. There are benefits in doing this, apparently, but it is possible that you might lose more than you gain. Googlebot understands parameters so your choice should only be influenced by benefits for the user experience. If you proceed, a plan to 301 every url to it's new location should be the first part of your design.
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  Tony Giovanni: Thanks Jim.
  
  We actually didn't start from square one. We just changed some of the programming because we hired an SEO firm about a year ago and they said we needed to change our URL structure. So our programmer changed it so the URLS would be pretty. So I basically just want to go from the old to the new in Google and everywhere else. I'm not even sure if there is an SEO benefit to it.
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  Jim Munro: Implement rel=canonicals to the new URLs and it's probably not too late to implement 301's as well. I would do this urgently. You would do this to preserve and transfer some of the value from your old URLs to the new but this will also take you from the "old" to the "new" as a consequence.
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  Tony Giovanni: Ok will do. Thank you!
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  Nick Fitzgerald: I agree with Jim, except for the canonical part. The 301s will handle any duplication issues in this case. Get those 301s in place ASAP to preserve as much of your existing rankings as possible. The canonicals may come into play though on any dynamically generated pages. So use them to point to the originals if you have any dynamically generated pages.
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  Tony Giovanni: Thank you guys very much. I did leave out an important fact... the old links will still work and point to the new pages so there won't be a loss ; but I don't want duplicates. So I should use 301 redirects for the pages?
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  Nick Fitzgerald: Tony, you should still 301 redirect the old URLs to the new . This will transfer much of the old SEO equity to the new pages, and then allow you to utilize the new URLs to advance you rankings even further.
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  Tony Giovanni: Thank you Nick and Jim. I am working on the 301s right now. I really appreciate the help.
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  Nick Fitzgerald: Good luck!