I just updated an old html site to php, I have quite a few inbound links to inner pages with page rank. so to avoid visitors getting a 404 error I used a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file so visitors looking for www.mysite.com/page.html now go to www.mysite.com Is this going to jepodise/invalidate my page rank or is there a better way to handle this? thanks for any info
A 301 redirect should effectively help you to keep your rankings and PR as long as all other things remain constant. 301 redirect passes on the link juice so I don't see a reason why anything should change. It is the same thing at a different location and you have communicated this to the search engines. The ranking may (a bleak possibility) undergo a small flux and if that happens it should come back to normal. PR stored in Google's data centers are very different to what is displayed on the green bar. Google uses PR from the data center in its ranking algo and it remains intact. So even it the Tool bar PR shows a dip, you should not worry too much. I am hoping you have updated the sitemap on Google's webmasters tool, if not it could be worth doing it.