Can I avoid 301 redirects?

Question

I'm restructuring the URLs on my website. Is there a way I can avoid 301 (or 302) redirects without cloaking? Anyone know anything about using bot detection to do this?

I want to avoid 301s since my site has well over 500,000 URLs, and I don't want the users to be slowed down by redirects, or risk de-indexing some or all of my content on SERPs.

Answer 1

you can try to use mod-rewrite if you are using apache, but 301s are probably the best way to go. Is there a reason you want to avoid them?
(for spiders, definately avoid 302s)