Changing file extensions

[Regent]

Hello,

I have a client who currently ranks very well with their .asp site. They are in the process of changing their whole site to .php. I told them to do 301 re-directs if possible to the new pages, but that rankings would suffer until the engines crawl the new pages. Is this correct?

Also, some of their ranking pages on the old site will become directories on the new site. So for example:

OLD page: mydomain.com/ranking.asp
NEW page: mydomain.com/ranking

All links to the NEW pages will be to the directory paths. Will the search engine rank directory paths? Any problem with this method?

Thanks for any help.

[cherryo]

From great advice on this forum I made the change from html to php without changing extensions . . . just changed my htaccess to parse html as php. I'd recommend a search on Google or this forum for how to do the same but with asp to php. I think it's doable and might save you the terror of risking 301's particularly with all the changes already going on.

[trimmer80]

are you familar with mod rewrite? You should be able to do this so that the names will not need to change.

[g1smd]

Add one line to your .htaccess file to let .asp pages be parsed for their PHP content. No need to change any lninks then!

[encyclo]

If you are linking to directories, make sure you always use the trailing slash otherwise the server has to issue a redirect to add it:

http://www.example.com/ranking[b]/[/b]

For everything else, simply do not change the filenames. Assuming you are running Apache, add this to your root-level .htaccess:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .asp

Then you can alter your PHP app to use the .asp extension.