Replacing broken urls (dreamweaver) to new ones in wordpress

Question

I am moving an entire site from html and dreamweaver format to wordpress. I imported the content using htlm import plugin that worked well. Now I have to correct all content links as they kept the same variable url format applied by dreamweaver and as I have changed the dite directory structure, most of them are broken now.

Basically, my issue is the following:

1) OLD site internal links urls (dreamweaver):

<a href="page.html">page</a>

2)Now, in WP, the correct url for it would be:

<a href="/parentpage/page/">page</a>

I am using BrokenLinks and Search&Replace plugins to correct them and my questions are:

Should i replace the old url (1 above) to:

a) <a href="/parentpage/page/">page</a> (2 above), or
b) <a href="/page/">page</a> ( I noticed that even though it is not the final full url (parent page and page), a link with this url works well in WP, probably due any redirect rules.

Even though both will finally work, I want to know if:

What should be the format (a or b above) I should use to replace the old ones to avoid problem in case I decide to modify the parent page, for example, from "/parentpage/page/" to "/parentpageX/page/"? My doubt is if I use the option "b" to replace the old one, if I change the parent page some time, this link would become broken again?

What is the better option take into account SEO?

Do you suggest any better method to handle this old broken url issue?

Thanks in advance for any help

Answer 1

I would use #2 (/parentpage/page/), since that's the 'official' URL WP assigned to it, WP will find the right page faster and it may help you with your SEO.

Yes, if you change slugs it will be a broken link, you could use the Redirection plugin for that (it has the option to add a redirection from the old slug to the new slug, I believe it's activated by default).