301 versus inline rewrites
- by Kristoffer S Hansen
I'm in the process of adding 'pretty' URLs to an existing CMS, the menu is auto generated and the new 'pretty' URLs are to be handled independently as a seperate module. The auto-generated menu allways has URLs that look like this index.php?menu_id=n which ofcourse we would like to see as eg. /news or /products
I'm currently at the point where I have to decide if I'm going to rewrite all output of the current system or simply put in a hook where I redirect to the 'pretty' URL.
To put it differently, should i connect to the database, fetch all 'pretty' URLs, run through the existing output from WYSIWYG's, news modules, forums etc. and do some str_replace or other string manipulation (which I think would be a rather tedious and boring process), or should I simply hook in and throw a 301 redirecting index.php?menu_id=3 to /news will Google (or other search engines) penalize me for having 301's in the menus?