shtml does it affect pagerank

home page ends in shtml. need advise

[JoeHouse]

Question for you experts.

My homepage url now ends with shtml. According to google toolbar I have no pagerank on homepage. When my homepage url ended in html I had a pagerank of 5.

Can anybody tell me is it because of shtml I have no pagerank?

I made the switch about 10 days ago. Is it ok or should I switch it back for better search engine performance?

Any Help Would Be Appreciated.

Thanks!

[shasan]

It's because Google thinks it's a different file.

yourpage.html is a different file than yourpage.shtml.

It's not the extension itself, if you would have changed the extension to .htm instead of .shtml, you would have had the same effect.

If you're using server side includes, I think you can set up your web server so that you don't have to use .shtml.

HTH.

[JoeHouse]

so what you are saying then is that in the end it should not affect my pagerank in the long run, right?

[jbinbpt]

In the long run there is not any difference. Just leave it one way or the other.

[shasan]

If your Page rank depended a lot on backlinks, you'll have some problems because you'll have to rebuild all those backlinks or get them to change to point to the the new filename, if you want to preserve your PR.

Otherwise, yes, all other factors on the page will be interpreted the same way by SE's once they crawl and index the page.

Regardless, it's a lot like starting from scratch except that you have the visitation and recognition among the humans. To the SE's though it's a brand new page.

The backlinks are your main problem.

HTH

[mcavic]

you'll have some problems because

If you use .htaccess to do a 301 redirect from the old page to the new one, that will take care of human and bot visitors, and it should pass the PR along.