Because once I made it in the top 3 serp position at G with 1 keyword in my meta keyword tag area and NEVER had the word on that page.
And are you 100% sure that it was the meta keyword that put it there, because there are scrapers and directories that will read the meta keywords and/or description from the home page and link to the page using that data.
Don't ever accept that what you think you see it actually what happened.
1.) Because when I look through my folders and files it's easier for me to identify what page I'm referring to or looking for. Like for instance a folder like /psbx.html is less identifiable and harder to find or refer to than /psp-xbox.html.
And that is a perfectly valid reason for changing the structure.
For the record, any 301 redirect changes should be seamless and not cause any problems. With our forum upgrade I instituted more friendly urls and haven't noticed problems or a lack of search traffic
Yep, but the caveat is that, not every site or page has built up the "reputation" and huge natural link base to many, many pages other than the "home" page that HR undoubtably has. So the loss of rankings and traffic is a worst case scenario for a large proportion of site owners/operators who go changing URI structures, and if you are prepared for that eventuality, anything less than that is a bonus.