User friendly urls and 301's

I'm kind of new to this and I have a few basic questions.

Let's say I have a site about fruit. www.mysite.com. Now on this site, I have a page that list all different types of fruit at www.mysite.com/list-of-fruits.php
Would it be a good idea to set up a redirect to this with say. www.mysite.com/fruits

And would it be bad to use lots of redirects for different pages? Such as www.mysite.com/apples.php becomes www.mysite.com/apples and so on.

 

According to my experience you should not use different redirect for your URL's. You can place your main keyword in URL in your URL. Just use redirect 301.

 

google is ok with redirects ... make sure you are using 301 redirect so that the rank in google will not be lost.
as a side note: both types of urls are good for seo.

 

i don't see any seo benefit in redirecting www.mysite.com/apples.php to www.mysite.com/apples. just removing the php doesn't make the url seo friendly. but if you want to do it to make the url look pretty (in your eyes that is), then feel free to do a redirect.

 

what is it about

 

actually there is no problem with the 301 redirecting. till now Google don't take it negatively

 

The list-of-fruits.php url seems fine there is no need to reduce it to something meaningless like fruits. The URL structure should also appear useful to humans as well as the search engines.

 

There's no harm in having nicer URLs, 301 is not the best way to do it though

 

You're making something a lot harder that you need to. If you want to have a specific URL structure, assuming you're using WP, then all you have to do is set your permalink structure accordingly. Otherwise, if its a static site then all you need to do is name like this apples.html oranges.html and they'll appear mysite.com/apples, mysite.com/oranges