Can I do a 301 redirect in robots.txt?

Question

I have a site which has a whole host of legacy links, which now need to be mapped to new links.

We need to update search engine results so that the legacy ones disappear and are replaced.

Because of the CMS we can't do this programatically, but I was wondering if we could set up a 301 redirect in the robots.txt file, which would update the search engine results at least.

I've seen conflicting information on the web for this, so was hoping for a definitive yay or nay.

Thanks Duncan

Answer 1

Why set it up for only search engines? What about users with bookmarks/history. Just setup your 301 redirects for all pages. Search engines will figure this redirection out..