Moving to wordpress, what to do with old links?

Moving my old mkportal site to wordpress cms, i will use fancy urls and im asking here how can i move at best. Since many links will not working (all of them) i use 404.html plugin, is that enough or should i use some other plugins and is there any way to convert urls from old machine to new... i think this is imposible, but i ask, maybe there is some wonderfull code or plugin to do so?

Anyway, will i face some kind of penalty from search engines?
I have website that get visited 1000 per day and now all links to it will be 404.html except frontpage (domain name links)

 

Use redirect?

 

Yea but how can i redirect 700 articles? I would need to recode every article, and im not even sure if that will help.

 

perhaps i will just wait for ClayShumate from BHW to help me

 

is this some kind of joke? Who is he anyway? Coder?
I think this cant be done automaticaly since every article have different title... and you will need to solve puzzle which article to which...

 

There's probably a more clever way to do it, but you should consider gritting your teeth and manually making the redirects like i did when I moved, and here's why: you can use this opportunity to optimize titles and urls. Title is the most important part of an article so if an article is under-performing, try changing the title. Yeah it really sucks (I only had to do about 350, so 700 sounds real nasty) but if you end up having to do it anyway, you may as well take the opportunity to do some title/url optimization.

After all, 10% of the advantage of wordpress over blogger is the ability to customize urls on a post-by-post basis!

 

Set up 301 redirects for pages with lots of inbound links.

Set up a custom 404 error page with a list of links to important pages in your site, this will help users find their way if the link is no longer valid.