Changing Page URLs across website - Negative Effects?

[ben1234zz]

Hi

We are thinking moving all of our site to extension-less pages whilst we are overhauling our site (for many reasons but also to future proof us technology wise). For example /contactus.aspx will now be /contactus/.

The same page will still be available from /contactus.aspx as it will from /contactus/ however the website will no longer have links to the page with the file extension.

My main question is: what affect will this have on our current Google etc rankings, will the new pages come in and the old pages slowly disappear. Or will something disastrous happen?

Many thanks for your time

B

 

[Foamcow]

You will lose any existing page rank that the old URL has.

You will lose the benefit of any pages linking to the old URL.

So, you need to ensure you do it right and set up 301 redirects for the old URLs to the new URLs.

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[ben1234zz]

Hi Foamcow

Thank you for your post.

So if the search engine is looking for: home.aspx, the url will still read home.aspx (however we have re-written the url so that it is actually getting the page "/home-new/") and we return a 303.

Then our page rank etc will be transferred seemlessly?

Many thanks

B

 

[Foamcow]

I think the response code should be 301 rather than 303

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Tyres: Mine's a pint of the black stuff.
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[ben1234zz]

Sorry typerror yes, same qu for 301