Regretfully, due to circumstances beyond my control, we are forced by an over-zealous company that is trying to 'protect' its brand name to change instances where it's in its plural form in the url to to match the copyrighted name. the brand in question is FitFlop and we currently market that under urls as /fitflops and prefix all their products with /FitFlops_<productname>. these should all now change to /FitFlop and /FitFlop_<product name>. they have given us until wednesday to comply or they will stop supplying us with stock. There is a serious SEO benefit out of using 'fitflops' as more people use that in google than they do 'fitflop' and 10s of companies do exactly what we do. my concern is, if I redirect via this rule: RewriteRule ^FitFlops(.*)$ /FitFlop$1 [L,NC,R=301] Code (markup): will this have a negative impact on all cached urls, how will google 'like' the 301. Long term effects of our page 1 rank for "fitflops" are also questionable... please advise what to do. personally, i feel this is totally ridiculous, what if the url was /brands/34 ?? they cannot be expecting to protect their brand through the urls! is there any way to keep the old urls working?
You website will not being penalized by do 301 redirect. It is a safest possible way for now. As long as those 301 lead the page to the ones that existed and not given 404 error then you would be fine. However, 301 is not an all-in-all solution. It may caused your inner pages ranking, page that had been redirected, to be fluctuated for a period of time. It is hard to predict but not less than 2-3 weeks from my own experienced. Since the issue was copyright related, I am afraid you may not have other solution unless 301 from "fitflops" to "fitflop". However, since this is only change just one character in url then it won't impact too much. You can still have a good old ranking as long as your contents are same. You can also help a little by done some deep links with "fitflops" anchor text toward the page. Doing with caution and use your own sense, overdoing it may cause a dropped in ranking instead of helped. Sorry to heard about the harsh approach by big company. Good luck anyway.
The 301 redirects are cool ways to use for web pages transitions over the net but as you may guess, some delays, ranking and PR drops could be expected, at least temporary because all the Google' solder cashes and database records would need to get updated with your new addresses details and this would be a time-consuming matter.