301 redirects in .htaccess

Hello all,

I am the webmaster for our company site and we recently changed the majority of our directory tree / link hierarchy for the entire site. It was recommended to me to use 'RedirectMatch 301' and 'Redirect 301' (depending on if I need regex matching) in my .htaccess file to forward all old links to the new ones. It sounds correct, but I wanted to get some other opinions on the proper way to handle this kind of migration. Would mod_rewrite in the .htaccess be better for this, and why?

In addition, we also set up a bunch of 'shortcuts' for our longer urls in the .htaccess file using the same method (redirect 301)... i.e. we might have an Awards page under /about/corp/awards.html but the end user could also just type /awards at the domain and get forwarded to the same page... also useful for advertising URLs in printed matter.
This would seem better suited for mod_rewrite, but Im wondering if its worth going through and re-doing it... is it *wrong* to use a 301 redirect for these shortcuts? (does it confuse or hinder our search rankings?)

Thanks much to all,
Goose_68

 

I use 301 Redirects for on a regular basis and it works fine for me.