301 Redirect vs Rewrite

Question

I have a site that was hosted by someone else all the web pages were .html files. I am now hosting the site and have changed it to a wordpress site. The domain has not changed but obviously all the pages have. What is the best way to redirect all the .html pages to the main url?

Answer 1

301 Redirect in an .htaccess does not require the mod_rewrite library. It's a much simpler way to redirect, but it doesn't have the flexibility and power you get using the Rewrite rules. If you have a 1-1 mapping with explicit urls you can use the Redirect:

Redirect 301  /path/file.html http://new.site.com/newpath.php

If you're trying to do wild card matching of a number of similar patterns using regular expressions you'll need to use Rewrite.

RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ http://new.site.com/$1.php [R=301,NC,L]

Here's a pretty good overview of the 2 methods: http://www.ksl-consulting.co.uk/301-redirect-examples.html