Migrating from html to asp

looking for pitfalls...

[dantheman]

Finally moving a site from html to asp extensions to use includes and dynamic data. If anyone has been through the same process I'd appreciate your thoughts on how it affected their Google rankings, if at all. I'm assuming the cutover goes well, but here is my simple plan.

1. Upload new .asp content (still using hard coded links)
2. Leave old .html content on server until next update, then redirect to new content (for other SE's)

What pitfalls should I look out for?

[korkus2000]

Only pitfalls I can think of is trying to stay away from querystrings in future development. If you are worried about the asp extension hurting your rankings you could change the htm and html extension to be handled by the asp.dll.

[Rhadamanthus]

Look into URL rewriting. Apache comes with mod_rewrite, and there's a free module for IIS called "ISAPI_Rewrite". Both of these allow complex and powerful remapping of URLs to point to other locations. I have mine setup to map something like "www.mysite.net/articles/12345.html" to my actual script "www.mysite.net/showarticle.aspx?id=12345". This lets me keep URLs that appear static, but actually point to dynamic content. This makes it easier for users to examine your underlying linking structure, and for some search engines to spider your site.

Depending upon what your old and new URLs are, it may even allow you to simply setup a redirect from the old to the new. This won't transfer your PR to the new URL (Google won't see them as the same link), but it will at least keep your old URLs in the index, and keep any backlinks you may have from breaking.

[dantheman]

Thanks for the imput. I won't be using querystrings at all - all links and pages are purely static. I'm moving to asp to use include files and some new forms, plus some dynamic content on certain pages.

I've heard before that pages could be ranked higher the longer they've been in the index. I personally don't believe this but is it true?