Will redirecting a bunch of old dynamic URLs to a single new index page totally bone my pagerank?

Question

I've got half a dozen legacy dynamic URLs and it turns out redirecting them all will require 18 Rewrite directives in my .htaccess file - that seems messy to me.

What I can do however, is redirect all of them to my new start page with a single Redirect directive. It's a tiny site and all the pages people might come in from via google searches are really easily findable from the start page so I'd like to do that however...

I'm worried this might kill the site's modest (but worth maintaining) page rank as several URLs would then be resolving to the same URL and content.

Does anyone know if this would be the case, and if so, if there are strategies to avoid that other then not implementing the above?

Thanks!

Roger.

Answer 1

As long as you do 301 Redirects (permanently moved) vs 302 Redirects (temporarily moved), then all the accumulated page rank from your dozen legacy URLs will transfer to the new url you are redirecting to.

So you will not "lose" the pagerank, it will simply be transfered over to the new URL.

The important thing is to ensure it's a 301 Redirect.