Can I use meta refresh instead of 301 redirect?

Question

I have submitted my site with ugly URLs to Google, and now they are appearing as mysite.com/show.php?id=42.

Now, I know that I can 301-redirect it to mysite.com/article/42. However, my site uses the URL form like stack exchange, so like this mysite.com/article/42/title-of-my-article which is in fact index.php?what=content&id=42&title=title-of-my-article.

Therefore, I cannot use only .htaccess for this, right?

So will it work if I do this?

• Keep show.php as the redirect node
• if user comes to show.php?id=42 , get the article of title with id=42, and echo "<meta http-equiv='refresh' content='0; url=http://mysite.com/article/42/$title'>

It will work for the visitors, but will it help Google to understand and change the URL to the new one?

Answer 1

In your show.php it looks like you have the title you need for the URL. So instead of echoing the meta tag, use PHP to do a 301 redirect:

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); 
header("Location: http://mysite.com/article/42/$title");