I'm building a little database driven PHP CMS. I'm trying to figure the best strategy for this case scenario:
I have a URL like this:
http://www.my.com/news/cool-slug
Someone saves or share this URL (or it gets indexed by Google).
Now I realize that the slug is not quite right and change it to:
http://www.my.com/news/coolest-slug
Google and users who previously saved the URL will hit a 404
error.
Is this the best and common solution (showing the 404) or should I keep a table in my database with all the history of the generated URLs mapped to the ID of the page and redirect with a 301
header?
Will this be an unnecessary load on my system (this table can get lots of records...)?