Replacing .jsp pages with .html pages

Will Google treat a 3 year old site as a new one?

[Blade3]

Hi

My client has a website with .jsp pages. He wants to replace them with .html pages (it's mandatory).
The domain name is the same.

How will Google treat the site for indexing? Will it treat the site as a brand new one? Any duplicate issues with old .jsp and new .html pages? What to do with reciprocal links?

Someone help me, please.

[zCat]

Personally I'd leave site structures as they are at the moment if you rank well in Google and if there's no compelling need. I have the impression Google is having enough trouble scanning pages it knows about, let alone news ones, and changing things sounds a bit risky.

If you can't avoid the change, use mod_rewrite to make sure the old pages get redirected to the new ones with a 301 status code. If it's just a case of changing all endings but the actual file names stay the same (e.g. example.com/page.jsp to example.com/page.html), that would only be a line or so. That will tell Google that your pages have moved; in theory the worst that will happen is that the old pages coexist in the index with the new ones for a while.

[Blade3]

Will there be any decrease in PR for the pages after redirection, zCat? The site pages have PR4.

[egurr]

I'm working on a customer site with a similar issue. Yes, of course the pages will lose PR, they are no longer the same page.
If you can roll the changes in to place over period of at least a couple of months. I know it's a drag but you'll come out better in the long run.