Forum Moderators: phranque
We've discussed this in a session a few years ago about how best to notify the SE's but I want to make sure I remember accurately.
Would someone please assist me in this matter. I seem to recall it having something to do with a modification to the sitemap and/or robots.txt file? Details please?
BTW - Hope to See Everybody in Vegas. :)
You'll need to either arrange 301 forwards from the old to the new, arrange to utilize the old names for the new files, or simply let nature take its course.
If you leave the old pages and the new, you will experience duplicate page problems; this is not a good idea. However, replacing the old with the new over a period of months will 'let nature take its course' in a more painless way, as the SEs can assimilate a fraction of the 'new' site at a time, rather than the whole. But the other approaches are superior.
If you simply remove the old and replace with new, the new pages will probably get indexed fairly quickly, but with loss of ranking for some months, gradually reaching pretty much where you were.
So doing something more than a simple swap would be a good idea, preferably not including duplicate content!
arrange to utilize the old names for the new files
Here's an approach to accomplishing that -- might make things smoother for you:
Parsing HTML as PHP [webmasterworld.com]
As far as I know, there's no need to do anything with robots.txt, and your sitemap would only change if your php approach is creating new content with urls that don't already exist with a .html extension.
