Big 301 Redirect Help!

[HarveyP]

Hey guys

I need a little help with setting up a big 301.

Background:

It's a bit of a mess as the old site is a total mess after being online for 10 years plus. It has html and php pages, and a mod rewrite to redirect old html links to the newer php version of those pages.

It's now moving to a new site and as the domain name and URL structure has changed we can't use any fancy regex and have to do a page to page redirect.

There are 1500 pages to redirect.

However, the old site has thousands of linking root domains, and some of these are to the old html pages (which currently redirect to the php pages) and some to the newer php pages.

Question:

My initial plan was to leave the mod rewrite and only redirect the php pages. That means 1500 individual redirects instead of 3000 if I individually redirect both the php and html pages.

I'm not sure what's best to be honest. We don't really want multiple hops in the redirect (html>php>new site), but surely 1500 redirects is better than 3000!

Does anyone have any advice on which option may be best, or even a better option?

Thanks

[onwebtoday]

Its not a good practice to redirect old -> new -> newer urls. It is referred as sneaky redirects and it will lower the SERPs.

Good option will

a. old -> newer

b. new -> newer

Decide any of the two options from above depending the number of backlinks to old and   new urls.

Also put a custom 404 error pages to handle the 404 errors occured from other urls.