To Redirect Or Not To Redirect

Couple pages I changed missed the update

[phish]

I recently rushed to get some last minute changes done during the december update. The content of these pages didnt change much but the pages were renamed from .html to .htm. Some of them made it and some didnt.Problem is when you click similar sites for the ones that didnt it shows the old .html before the minor changes and extension changes were made.

Question1..its not very important for me to change this before the next update,but will google index the new .htm when it crawls and penalize me for dupes?

Question2..Since all the new pages link to the .htm when google crawls again will it just drop the .html? or should I have to do a 301 permanent redirect to have google drop them?

[andreasfriedrich]

If no links point to your old files and the server returns a 404 status code for those URIs then Googlebot will drop them from the index. If the resources stayed the same and just the URI changed then it is a good idea to use redirects regardless of whether they are necessary for Google. Itīs just good style not to disappear without any notice.

Now let me ask you this: Why did you feel like you needed to change the extension of your URIs from html to htm? Just like you donīt change your name every other day it is a good idea to keep your URI namespace as static as possible. Changes in the filesystem namespace on your webserver should (almost) never cause you to changes the URIs as well.

Andreas

[phish]

its a new site..we were testing a few different options..besides for the .htm .html thingy we also were deciding wether or not to use active server pages or perl for a shopping cart so we also have a .asp versus .pl situation we basically rushed to make the update and got caught with our pants down half way thru. =) Now that the site is done i just need to get those few pages off the index and pointed to the permanent pages.

[phish]

i guess im just being cautious because it has just gone thru its first full crawl..and with 301's being a touchy subject these days ..i want to make sure