duplicate content

is this bad?

[phatsuit]

I recently redid my main site and wanted to leave some of the old pages since I had a ton of people linking to me. Would google hold it against me if I had a xyz.htm and a xyz.html which were identical?

[chiyo]

Yes... google will mind. How they act could be anything from just ignoring one page or penalizing the whole site, depending on other factors...

Weve never had a problem doing a simple 10 second direct to the new page, and just having text saying "...this page has moved to <link>blah</link> Click on the link or wait 10 secs to be redirected". (Yes I come from the stone age!)

However there are smarter solutions discussed here often by using things called "403" (?) redirects or something link that using htaccess and such. Do a search and you will find that.

[Chico_Loco]

For the record..

Using the redirect via HTML is an ok solution if you only have a few pages. The PR (minus the dampening factor) will go to the new page. But using a 301 (permanent redirect) using htaccess would be by far the best solution.

If all .htm extensions have changed to .html then a rewite line using htaccess would be really easy, it would rewrite all .htm extensions to .html

[darnbarn]

Does anyone know how using a missing.html works in this instance?