301 redirects problem

[green]

Hi, there.

Many years ago when I was even greener and knew nothing about URL addresses, I wrote some file names for my website with spaces!

As they got linked and the search engines accepted and ranked them, I left those few pages with the space in the file name hoping all would be OK.

Now I'm paying the price of my foolishness. My hosting service Yahoo is changing all its Yahoo Services users to their updated Yahoo Small Business whether you want it or not. They also state that files with spaces in file names will no longer be valid or editable. So I have to update the files erasing the spaces.

As these have a good ranking in Google, I'm trying to add 301 re-direction links, but unsuccessfully, using this code I got from the Internet.

RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /oldname.htm http://www.somesitename.com/newname.htm

This goes into a file named .htaccess

I understand I write this .htaccess file as:
Redirect 301 /aaaa aaaa.htm http://www.mysitename.com/aaaa-aaaa.htm

But the whole site fails ie. there is an error message for every page! (due to the space?)

So I wrote it with the HTML code for the space in the old file:

Redirect 301 /aaaa%20aaaa.htm http://www.mysitename.com/aaaa-aaaa.htm

The site doesn't fail but the page will not redirect and gets a 401 error message.

Getting frustrated here! Is my coding right or is it that file names with spaces can't be redirected with 301? PLEASE HELP!!

[jscheuer1]

Try quoting:

Redirect 301 "/aaaa aaaa.htm" http://www.mysitename.com/aaaa-aaaa.htm

[green]

Magnificent! Works fine! Thank you, Scheuer