shtml or htm?

[royalelephant]

My pages' on my site have ssi's and the extensions are .shtml.

Are there any security, SEO, or other reasons why it would be beneficial to change my .shtml's to .htm's?

[Mardi_Gras]

>Are there any security, SEO, or other reasons why it would be beneficial to change my .shtml's to .htm's

None that i can think of. I recently changed because I no longer needed the ssi's and it made no difference in my rankings. No security problems that I have heard of with shtml...

[vrtlw]

The only reason why you may want to change shtml files to htm is to save on server resources as the files are no longer parsed for includes. Obviously this means that SSI directives would no longer work. There is a .htaccess modification to parse alternate file names as SSI but that would defeat the object.

[encyclo]

In fact, there are significant SEO reasons why you shouldn't change - if you want to ensure your ranking, never change URLs unless you're absolutely forced to. If you change your filenames, you would have to resort to URL rewriting, otherwise most of your referals from the SERPS would get a 404.

Search engines don't care one iota whether you use .htm, .shtml, .php or .foobarbaz, so just pick one and stick with it even if you change technologies! For example, if you decided to go to PHP, you should make your existing URLs be parsed for PHP, rather than renaming the files.

[royalelephant]

thanks: for the time being I'll just keep my shtml's so there's no foul up with my rankings. That's what I was really concerned about.