301 Redirect Help

[hiphound]

Hello!

I am getting ready to launch my freshly coded site in the next week or so. My product URLs are changing SLIGHTLY and want to confirm I am going about things the right way:

A. My LIVE site store URLs look like http://hiphound.com/shop/dog-collars . My DEV site store URLs look like http://hiphound.com/dog-collars . No /shop directory.

B. The dev firm installed the rewrite rule below:

############################################

enable rewrites

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

#RedirectMatch 301 ^/shop?/$ http://hiphound.com/

RedirectMatch 301 ^/shop?/$ http://hiphound.com

###########################################

C. When I manually enter a URL with /shop in the address the website redirects to the correct page which is good.

QUESTIONS I HAVE

1. Is the above redirect correct? I need them to permanent. Don't think the above is right...

2. Will links in the Google index be redirected as well? I am assuming yes but just want to confirm.

3. For each page indexed in Google will its pagerank, etc. be passed to the new page using just the 301 above?

4. Do I need to create addtional 301s for each page? So mapping the old page to the new page?

Please advise. The goal here is to of course preserve the rankings of the pages already in the Google index. THANK YOU!!!

Lynn

[wissamdandan]

Dear hiphound,

1. Yes its correct the syntax used is whenever there is in the URL /shop/ will be permanently redirected to the correct URL.

2)Yes

3)Yes

4)No need to additional, current redirect is enough.

[hiphound]

Thank you!! I appreciate the direction!

Lynn