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I just converted my entire site from .htm to .asp. I want to now remove all the .htm pages from my site, but I am worried about google showing the cached urls that still point to the .htm pages... BTW, I converted all the links on the old .htm pages to point to the new .asp pages. (Visitors should only see the .htm page they entered on then travel through the site on the new asp pages.)
Will google deep crawl my site based on this major change?
Should I wait to see if google will deep crawl my new links before removing the old pages?
If not what can I do to prevent the 404 errors?
Lastly, will this change effect my positioning severely? As I am in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th slots for one of my 2 main keywords.
As a side note: my sites PR ranges from 5-6
Thank you in advance :)
Cheers-
U4EA
Or if you're on a shared server and don't have access to such things, but you are able to make a custom 404 error page you can test the querysting for the page that was requested. And if the page they were looking for was an html file, just do a 301 redirect to the asp page. Then if the asp page still doesn't exist they will still get a 404 error. (Or you could do redirects for specific pages instead of all html files, but it's more code.)
I'm assuming you are using a windows iis server, since you have asp pages, but if your on an apache server it's even easier. Just change your .htaccess file to redirect them.
The 301 redirects will be found by the search engines eventually and change your indexed pages. And you don't have to keep those html files around.
