theBear - 4:48 am on Nov 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

pccasino, you aren't paying attention.

You do not change the names of pages known to the search engines.

If you do it will hurt your rankings.

Half of the world may have linked to one of your pages say superfantasticpageshere/index.shtml if you change it to superfantasticpageshere/index.taf then the links are no longer counted.

If you redirect index.shtml to index.taf you hope the S/E handles it correctly.

Lately I wouldn't bet 2 cents on the outcome of any redirects being handled timely if done correctly and handled correctly.

You are on your own if you change the names and you redirect properly, however it is certain if you change the names and don't at least hide that fact from the S/E by doing rewrites (not redirects) you will lose positions.

You can get away with some renaming if the rename is to an equivalent index type that has remained hideen by not having been used.

superfanstaicpageshere/ for example could actually be

superfantasticpagehere/index.php

or

superfantasticpageshere/default.asp

provided the proper default index file names are specified in the server setup.

However in both cases above the file is called by the name of

superfantasticpageshere/