: The only thing that matter is what clients (including Googlebot) see. When you implement 301 redirects, it doesn't matter if you do it using Apache's mod_alias, rewrite rules, or through

@Megan663

The only thing that matter is what clients (including Googlebot) see. When you implement 301 redirects, it doesn't matter if you do it using Apache's mod_alias, rewrite rules, or through a custom 404 handler. The only thing that matters is the status code that browsers and bots see when they visit the URL. You should test this yourself using the command line program curl. It should look something like this:

$ curl --head blog.example.com/some-page.html HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: Apache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 23:44:25 GMT
Location: example.com/some-page.html Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: Keep-Alive


Just because you have used your custom 404 handler to produce a 301 redirect, it doesn't mean that clients ever see a 404 error. In fact they don't. Custom 404 handlers can return any status, not just 404. You have made it so the hander returns 301 status in these cases.

There will be no way for Google to know about your convoluted setup. Because of that, your implementation is absolutely fine from an SEO standpoint.

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