Hi everybody I hope somebody here will be able to help me with this. I plan to cenvert all .htm files of one of my pages into .shtml files The reason 4 this is that want to make it easier to change menus and stuff. ( The hosting service I am with only allows ISS commands in shtml files ) I guess the major search engines will index the new files within one month. I will also use .htaccess redirects. However .... here is my big conern. Can I expect that google yahoo and co will put my sites back to the same positions as the old htm files. Of course i dont wanna lose traffic and some of my keywords bring quite a lot of visitors. The only difference will be the ending of the files. Mata tags and content will stay exactly the same... Regards Mavi
If you have the ability to use .htaccess, you may be able to keep your .htm files and have them parsed at .shtml files... That way you would not lose the current pages you have indexed and/or backlinks pointed to. I'm not sure about that; I don't do ssi myself, but I have all my .html pages parsed as .php using .htaccess. Do a little research on this, or ask over at experts-exchange.com (very handy site).
Yes, this is the best solution. I did it before. Search Google for "parse htm as shtml" or something like that. What you add in .htaccess should look something like this: AddHandler server-parsed .html AddHandler server-parsed .htm
If you change your file extension, your rankings will be affected for a little while before SE realise this change. If possible, avoid doing this. YOu will save yourself from some stress you will go through between the time when your pages drops in ranking and regains the previous position. So think twice. If you are ranking going with a URL do not do a redirect, this will mess up your rankings for some time which is not a fixed duration (could be day, week, months).
First of all thanx everybody... Good to hear that i am not the first one to do this... I will have to make tis change becasue it becomes too complicated to make changes. I heared it is also possible to use SSI in htm files, but my provider says they don´t allow this becasue it slows down their system. I didn´t know about parsing htm as shtml before... And I was going to ask how to do that next.... But u already gave me an example.... THANX.. I think that will help.... Addiditional i think i will keep the 20 files that bring the most traffic as .htm too. ( Untill both are inexed ) Maybe i will change the shtml version slighty to see what happens and to avoid that SE punish me for having duplicate files. Thanx again. Martin.
Options +Indexes Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^DIRECTORY/([^.]+)\.htm$ http://www.SAMEdomain.com/DIRECTORY/$1.shtml [R=301,L] Knock out DIRECTORY/ if there is no directory.