Hi,

 

I have a few sites that were done about 2 years ago - HTML4. I want to update the sites and intend on using php and therefore all pages will be .php rather than .html.

 

What effect, if any, will this have on SEO? The site has been around for over 2 years and is linked to. I was thinking - should I amend my .htaccess file and have redirects for all pages from the html to the new .php one??

 

Any help/advice would be much appreciated.

 

Happy new year!

Just add 301 permenant redirects from old page > new page and search engines will eventually reindex everything and keep any page values intact.

Ok great.

 

Some of the pages will not be replaced though. So should redundant pages be redirected at all or just allowed to go to a 404? If the latter, should I do a bespoke 404?

 

Basically - the entire site is changing what it 'sells'. So should re-visiting users be told somehow that the site has changed, and recommend somewhere else to go? The content originally on this site will be moving to another.

 

Confusing isn't it?