Will I lose my rankings if I rewrite my site in .asp?

• I'm about to upgrade my website quite dramatically from a .html site to more dynamic .asp site. This means all my URLs will have .asp at the end, although I'll still have the same domain name. My current search engine rankings are very good. Will this new .asp site affect my rankings?

Answer: YES! ...and it's a good thing you asked!

A change in the file extension is a major issue. If you change all your file extensions from .html to .asp, you are essentially moving all your pages. In that situation you will be in for a major shake-up in your online rankings.

For example, if you were to rename:

http://www.yoursite.com.au/catalogue/category10

to

http://www.suerice.com.au/catalogue/category10/index.asp

...you've changed the location of the page, and search engines (and your users) no longer have any idea how to find the page. Thus, it quickly disappears from the search engine's index and search engine traffic drops to zero.

It can then take several months for the search engines to reindex those pages at their new location and drop the old pages completely. Even worse, you lose all your incoming links because they now point to URLs that don't exist. Goodbye PageRank and search rankings.

Fortunately, there is almost never any reason to change the URLs. Your server can be configured so that .asp pages can be mapped to .html pages, or even to pages with no extension at all. Microsoft servers can be configured so that pages .html file extensions are parse for .asp scripting. To configure your website this way, see this tutorial:

Process .HTM Files with Scripts and Server Side Includes

That tutorial is for .htm files. If you're using .html as your file extension, then simply replace .htm with .html in that tutorial.

If you can do that, this change would be very clean and trouble free for you, as it won't require changing any of your URLs.

If this isn't an option, then you'll need to create redirect...