I had to change a folder name on my website and thus I need to make a 301 redirect so the search engines do not penalize me and any links on external websites still work...

Old folder: /old

New folder: /new

 

Both of the rewrites below work, but which one is the best one to use so that for instance Google will know this is a 301 redirect and eventually stop indexing the old folder?

 

RedirectMatch 301 old/(.*) /new/$1

RewriteRule ^old/(.*)$ /new/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

 

Even though both work as advertised, which one is the correct one to use for SEO purposes?

 

TIA!

I think use RewriteRule.

This explains well