I had a mod rewrite on my article urls this weekend to change the urls of my articles from /article_index.php?pg=ShowArticle&aID=127 to /article/year/month/day/title My question is, how would it be best to redirect the search engines to the new pages? Should I: A) write a single 301 redirect for each article in the .htaccess to every article (about 280 of them) or B) do one 301 redirect on the article_index.php to the sitemap where all the articles are listed? Suggestions?
I am doing both and would also like to know if there's a better solution than adding a new line to .htaccess for every article. On the subject of redirecting in the php script--I 301 redirect to the new URL instead... also, I would be careful or avoid redirecting them to the sitemap, not sure about duplicate content penalty.
I would think that if the search engines saw the article_index.php redirected to the sitemap it would tell them to drop those pages and reindex the urls from the sitemap. The only way to redirect to the urls that I can see is through .htaccess, but that is a load of redirects to do.