URL rewriting and page rank

re-writing .asp pages to .html to retain pagerank

[kunwarbs]

currently i have static website with over 5000 webpages (all html pages) which i have to convert to .asp to make website dynamic.

most of my .html pages have descent pagerank 3-6. I wanted to know if i rewrite the urls as .asp pages to .html, will that retain my pagerank or should i put a 301 redirect so that each of .html page redirects to corresponding .asp page?

[jdMorgan]

If you internally rewrite the URL-paths to the new filenames correctly, then no sign of this will be visible to search engines or users. As far as the "Web world" is concerned, your site will not have changed at all.

If you externally redirect the URLs, PageRank will usually be passed from the old URL to the new URL, but this takes time. Depending on how often each of your existing pages is spidered and re-ranked, it might take anywhere from weeks to many months to pass the PR from the .html URLs to the .asp URLs.

All-in-all there's no reason to use an external redirect in this case.

Jim