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Because the website is only 3 weeks old I didn't suffer any ranking loss but does having pages that no longer exist going to hurt my search engine future rankings? Is there some steps I should take to avoid googlebot visiting my .html pages that no longer exist or does this even matter. Will google drop these pages after a while and reindex my .php pages?
Well, it's not ideal. I frankly don't know what the SE's with do with this, but one thing I can say is, better that you switched now than later.
If it weren't for all the 301 issues out there, especially lately again, I'd suggest 301'ing the old to the new pages.
If it weren't for the kooky and sensitive dup content filters that the SE's employ, I'd suggest just letting the old ones quietly vanish.
Given the issues with 301's, and the issues with dup content, personally, I'd probably 410 the old pages and let the site start over again, and hope that Y doesn't wack you for dup issues and that G doesn't wack you for whatever they wack people for these days and keep your site a secret for 12+ months.
Other opinions?
