What header to use for redirect?

[eluser]ehicks727[/eluser]
[quote author="mvdg27" date="1219706213"]Do you really think this could come accross as spammy by Google?[/quote]

Put simply... yes.

Google's #1 concern is making its results relative to the search query. Spammers and black-hats #1 goal is to trick Google and manipulate their sites to get ranked highly. So, Google spends a LOT of effort in trying to detect black-hat techniques.

Well, redirecting... (or at least the abuse of redirecting) is probably detected as a spammy technique.

A popular black-hat technique using redirecting is to display different content to different user agents (such as if the useragent is GoogleBot, then display this page... if user agent is Windows XP, then display this other page [the spam page]). That's called 'cloaking'.

There are other, more tricky ways of cloaking, but redirecting is probably the simplest (and most easily detectable).

I'd stay away from redirecting, unless you do it from your .htaccess file, and the purpose is because you renamed/deleted a page and want to redirect your traffic to the new page without losing your index.