What will happen to my PR?

[ntrance]

Last month our site finally got some PR (with the index page getting a PR5 and mostly PR4 from there on down). The site was all clean HTML.

This month we are launching an affiliate scheme, and to make it all work we are sadly having to redo the site in .asp. Will we lose all our PR? Obviously our features.html page wont exist and will now be features.asp so it will lost it's PR4.

But what about index.asp? As the default loading page for the domain will it retain the PR5 now that index.html is gone?

Thanks for the help

[kaled]

PR is generated by backlinks. If those backlinks point to a directory that serves index.html then the new page index.asp should inherit the PR (as I understand things).

Other pages will not keep their PR. However, take a look at the url of this thread. Note that, even though these pages are created dynamically, they are served using the .htm extension.

I have no experience in this area, but I believe that a server configuration change is required. Something to do with .htaccess file. You should investigate the possibility of editing this to solve your problem.

Kaled.

[jcoronella]

If you do a 301 Redirect (permanent) from the old page to the new page, then your PR will follow.

[diamondgrl]

jcoronella, are you sure that PR will follow with a permanent redirect? It has definitely not been my experience, at least not in the 4-6 weeks since switching. All my pages dropped from 5 PR to 0.

[Sharper]

Why not have whoever is managing your webserver setup a quick ISAPI filter so that index.asp can be called as index.html and just gets rewritten internally.

If whoever is managing the server can't handle that in an hour or two of work and a quick search on google if they don't have the right DLL handy (I'm assuming you're running on windows, what with the .asp talk), then you probably need to get a new administrator. :)

If you've got an existing naming scheme, for heaven's sake don't waste a couple months of screwing around with your search engine rankings when you can make it a total non-issue with a couple of server settings.