[support] Path Redirect or Custom URLs

Hi Folks,

A site I'm taking over has had content migrated from another CMS. The old URLs are important and need to be preserved. There is an admin assistant available to do the grunt work.

My question: Which method is better from an SEO perspective (is there an another perspective???, if so do share):

- Drupal core's path module; paste in the old urls as the path alias - use http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect to redirect the old paths to new ones created with the pathauto module.

I don't know if it makes a difference or not... but all the old paths end in "shtml".

Other suggestions?

The site is running 6.20 and clean URLs.

Thanks in advance,

Shai