To redirect or not redirect?

Changing page names using dashes

[IONWeb]

This is something I have struggled with for a while now. Seven of my pages are listed in G with a url format of somepage.com/page_one.html

I recently changed the names to page-one.html, page-two.html, etc... (using hyphens). I did for two reasons:
Visibility - underscores are sometimes hidden in a link

Keyword identification - theory behind using hyphens instead of underscores for the way SE's view them as spaces and not characters (or so I am led to believe by empirical tests I have seen here)

My question is this - should I do a 301 redirect from the underscore pages to the new hyphen pages or will G (and other SE's) reindex then new pages as they are?

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

[bufferzone]

Braindump initiated. delete because of core meltdown

[edited by: bufferzone at 7:09 am (utc) on April 2, 2004]

[DoppyNL]

That’s what I would do, with a customized 301 page, probably using JavaScript redirect.

This doesn't go together. 301-pages don't even exist!

a 301 redirect consists of 2 header lines:
the reponse status: 301 moved permanently
and the new location: [new-location...]
browsers will redirect immidiatly when receiving this, and this is the best way to move your pages.

It's also a good idea to remove those redirects after some time (when traffic through that link reduces) with a standard 404; as some SE's will otherwise keep the page in their index. It's a good idea to still keep a message there that the page has moved and also give a link to the new location in this 404; usefull for normal users.
If you've got lots of remote links directly to those pages, it might be a good idea to keep those 301's there forever.

If you can't use headers on your server; create a 404 page that will not be indexed by the SE's and put links to other pages on there and tell the users the page has moved.
No need for an automatic redirect from that page; give the visitor the time to read the message and let them click by themselves.

[IONWeb]

Thanks doppy,
I do understand 301's and how to implement them but maybe I didn't phrase my question properly - my concern is more of how search engines view 301's (which is what I am not sure about). Let me explain perhaps a little better what I am thinking here...

The site is only about 3 weeks old and already has most of its pages (with underscores in url i.e. mysite.com/page_one.htmml ) in Google.

My thought is if I 301 the underscore pages to the hypen pages, will Google index the hypen pages or just continued to index the older pages?

[DoppyNL]

Google will do this (found this out when moving a site of my own):

- index the new pages
- old pages stay in the SERPS; but drop to the bottom
- new pages take position of the old ones.

I used 301 redirect to move the site.
This week I removed the 301 and replaced it with a 404 wich contains a message that the site moved; so the old urls will probably be removed soon :).