url rewriting

[digicam]

hi, I am thinking of implementing a URL rewriter to change my pages from "&blah.aspx" to "pagetitle.htm"

What will Google make of this? will it drop all my old pages and reindex the htm pages properly or will it mess itself - and my site?

opinions welcome

cheers

[Brett_Tabke]

Do a 301 redirect from the old urls to the new urls and you will be great.

[ogletree]

If G already knows about these pages G will still see them and will see dup content. You need to make it so that if someone loads that page they get a 301.

[Patrick Taylor]

Even better would be "/pagetitle" with no file suffix.

[digicam]

Many thanks, I will do a 301, wondering why having no suffix is better?

cheers.

[phpmaven]

Even better would be to not change the page names at all, unless this is a site that doesn't currently have an SE presence.

[Patrick Taylor]

Why having no suffix is better...

W3C:

File name extension. This is a very common one. "cgi", even ".html" is something which will change. You may not be using HTML for that page in 20 years time, but you might want today's links to it to still be valid.

For that reason, I think.

[digicam]

"Even better would be to not change the page names at all, unless this is a site that doesn't currently have an SE presence"

The reason was that I was thinking that .htm pages look better in the title bar and I thought that .htm pages would be spidered better.

I now think it makes no difference what suffix is used - google can spider .aspx as easily as .htm

cheers.