Changing from .ASP to .PHP

page names will change, what to do?

[Namaste]

Next month, my whole site changes to .php from .asp. Which is a new page name. Google will obviously not associate the new page name with the earlier one.

Does anyone have any advise on what is to be done?

[Brett_Tabke]

htaccess hard redirect (301) from old to new.

[BigDave]

To avoid ever having this sort of problem, what I do is only have one publically available file per directory, and always use the index name.

So all my links will be to

example.com/red-widgets/

instead of

example.com/red-widgets.html
example.com/red-widgets.php or
example.com/red-widgets.asp

All I have to do is change what the default index is and the rest of the world never knows the difference.

I do use various filename.php type files when people are logged in, but those do not affect search engines or external deep links.

[raptorix]

Very easy, change in webserver config that *.asp is parsed by the php interpreter.

[PatrickDeese]

was going to suggest the same thing - technically there is no reason to change your file name extensions if you don't want to.

If you want to you can change a file with a ".html" extension to ".fake" and upload it - the browser will parse it as txt/html anyhow.

[graywolf]

To avoid ever having this sort of problem, what I do is only have one publically available file per directory, and always use the index name

BigDave is spot on with this one. Just say no to linkrot.

[Namaste]

Very easy, change in webserver config that *.asp is parsed by the php interpreter.

have you done it? No issues with Google?

[PatrickDeese]

> have you done it? No issues with Google?

how would Google even know? It is totally server side.

I have html parsed as PHP on most of my sites, and they rank just fine.

[renee]

my site was originally written using asp and migrated to php about 2 years ago. I retained the *.asp filenames and has been transparent to the search engines. you can say the transition was "bumpless".