rename *.htm to *.asp, and search engines ranking

[Tomazaz]

Hi,

We are thinking to integrate CMS to our page and we have one problem. Some of our web site pages has hight ranking for some keywords in search engines. For our new CMS we need to rename all our pages from *.htm to *.asp, the file names does not required to change.

How file renaming can effect page ranking?
How correctly redirect from old .htm pages to new *.asp?

Regards,
Tomas

[rogerd]

You can set the server to process .htm files as ASP, which could avoid the name change altogether. That would work if your CMS will let you retain the current page names.