Use a 301 redirect or not?

Help or damage rankings?

[skuba]

Hi Guys,
here is a situation I am faced now and I couldn't really find much about this case specifically.

We are creating some custom pages for SEO that will be highly focused on 1 brand at a time.

I initially requeted the URL to be
www.website.com/brandname

But I have been informed we won't be able to set a rewrite now, so we will have to use a 301 redirect to

www.website.com/content.php?page=brandname

We will link to the custom page from the site map.

here is the question:

Since we have to do the 301 at this time, I am leaning towards not doing any redirect at all, and linking directly to the non-SEO-friendly
www.website.com/content.php?page=brandname

I am thinking it's better than linking to a SEO-friendly
www.website.com/brandname
just to then have it redirect to the other one.

What is your opinion?
I really appreciate it.

Thanks

[g1smd]

Navigational clicks within a site should never pass through a redirect.

If you are going to use 'friendly' URLs they should be used with a rewrite, and NOT a redirect.

Mod_Rewrite can be used for both redirects and rewrites. If you can do redirects, then you can also do rewrites.

[skuba]

Hi g1smd,

unfortunetly we don't have access to our htaccess file. We do the redirect through the company the caches our site. We use a caching service for acceleration and performance. So, they can put a 301 redirect on their end.
Does it make sense?

Thanks