Semantic overlay networks cluster peers that are semantically, thematically or socially close into groups, by means of a rewiring procedure that is periodically executed by each peer. This procedure establishes new connections to similar peers and disregards connections to peers that are dissimilar. Retrieval effectiveness is then improved by exploiting this information at query time (as queries may address clusters of similar peers). Although all systems based on semantic overlay networks apply some rewiring technique, there is no comprehensive study showing the effect of rewiring on system’s performance. In this work, a framework for studying the attribution of rewiring strategies in semantic overlay networks is proposed. A generic approach to rewiring is presented and several variants of this approach are reviewed and evaluated. We show how peer organisation is affected by the different design choices of the rewiring mechanism and how these choices affect the performance of the system overall (both in terms of communication overhead and retrieval effectiveness). Our experimental evaluation with real-word data and queries confirms the dependence between rewiring strategies and retrieval performance, and gives insights on the trade-offs involved in the selection of a rewiring strategy.