: Which is more SEO friendly, redirect or rewrite? On Apache 2.4, which is better for multiple migrated URLs in terms of SEO, 301 redirect or rewrite? I have ~50 URLs.

@Shelley277

If you do choose to do a 301 redirect, you can set headers to stop the browser caching the redirect:

<ifModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 seconds"
</ifModule>

<ifModule mod_headers.c>
<filesMatch "$">
Header set Cache-Control "store, no-cache, must-revalidate"
</filesMatch>
</ifModule>


Possibly some adjustment is required on filesMatch depending on your redirects.

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@Rambettina238

It generally makes little difference.

A 301 redirect may cause a short term drop in ranking, but nothing to worry about.

An internal rewrite keeps the same URLs. You just need to be careful that you don't end up with duplicate content on multiple URLs.

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@Sherry384

mod_rewrite is the module that enables the redirection.

301 redirection should be done if you have a content on page A and not that has been migrated to a different subdomain or another link all-together.

So 301 redirect page A -> page B to indicate this to crawler to get complete seo authority passed from page A to B

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