thanks for the great reply!
i've taken out the -a- from my urls using the example rewrite rule you gave and it works great.
so now my old /article/something-with-stopwords-p-123.html is being 301d to /articles/something-with-123.html.
The whole point of what i was trying to do with the 301s is to stop duplicate content. had i kept /stopword-url-p-123.html not 301 to /no-stopword-url-123.html, that would have created duplicated content, right?
I have about 220something pages indexed on google when i do a site:, about 150 of which have the stopwords and -p-123.html url, so now i will begin to see these urls drop out of the index and be replaced with the /no-stopword-123.html urls, right?
Sorry for all the redundant and probably amateur questions
somehow my site ranks very well for a lot of good keywords, even though my domain is only a few months old and so far i have no backlinks, so i want to do whatever i can to at least keep it that way, if not make it better.
thanks again!