Will SE bots see the keywords in my URL if they're performed with a 301 redirect?

Question

I just noticed some pages on my site were like ... controlpanelbuild.aspx.

For SEO purposes, I know it's preferred to use hyphens in between URL-based keywords.

So I just renamed the file to control-panel-build.aspx and set up a 301 redirect in my global.asax file and everything is working fine. If you clicked a link that said controlpanelbuild.aspx it'd redirect to control-panel-build.aspx.

My question is should I go through my 5 master pages, as well as all 12 resource files (12 different languages) and change the internal links in there (menu links, sitemap links, etc.)? Will the SE bots see the URL without the 301? Or will the googlebot, bingbot, etc., all the SE bots, will they see the corrected URL with the hyphens? Thanks for any guidance anybody can offer!

Answer 1

The 301 redirect essentially tells search engines that the old URL doesn't exist anymore and is now located at the new URL. All links and other good stuff associated with the old URL are associated with the new one (with a slight dampening factor) but as far as the search engines are concerned the new URL will affect those pages' rankings, not the old URLs.