Hello and thank you for a very informative post! Even after all that explanation, I am still left needing one or two clarifications. This is mostly because cPanel does NOT leave me with an .htaccess file that looks like the recommended syntax.

I first redirected my pages using the Redirect Feature of my cPane*l. I chose Permanent, which I presumed is a 301. However, I just viewed my .htaccess file and it reads as fol*lows:



From what I've been reading, it SHOULD read more like:

My first question... IS there a difference between the two v*ersion above as far as Google is concerned? As you can see, there is no mention of '301' in the version that cPanel created.


Second, the version that cPanel created included some extra characters that are not present in what seems to be the recommended syntax. What is the carat and dollar sign for, that cPanel p*ut in
their version of the code, that is not in the second version of th*e code.

Do I need the carat and dollar sign? Am I better off not using the cPanel redirect feature and just doing it manually?

Followup:
I changed the page names on a few page names and did the cPanel redirect about 10 days ago, but my prior page PR of 4 has not ported over to the new page name, hence I have stopped making the changes to other pages until I figure out what to do so all my hard work to get to PR4 is not lost.

Thanks for you guidance.
Vic
http://www.web-hostess.com