Hi guys,

 

I recently finished redesigning my uncles website. The old sites files had the .htm extension, the new site files use the .html extension. So unfortunately all the pages indexed on google have broken links because they point to files with .htm and not .html.

 

I WAS going to just change all the extensions back to .htm, but I thought:

 

a ) i feel .htm makes a site feel older, from frontpage 97 days

b ) when googlebot revisits the site it will index the new pages and extension

 

However, unfortunately according to the websites visitor statistics the google bot HAS visited the site in the past 48hrs and yet it still hasnt indexed the new pages. I also submitted a sitemap using google's webmaster tools.

According to these tools the sitemap has been downloaded but the new urls havent been indexed.

 

Could anyone tell me why if the bot has visited the site already the pages havent been re-indexed yet and also how long this might take?

 

I am aware you can have old pages deleted from the google index but I believe you are only supposed to do this in emergencies.

 

Would appreciate some advice on this situation.

 

Thankyou

Edited February 6, 201115 yr by AndyDesigns

I redesigned my portfolio a few weeks back, and apart from the root (kylecooper.co.uk) google had indexed my new pages within a few days (ie, new meta description and "snapshot" of my site).

 

The root took about 3 weeks to appear with the updated details in google. Although I could see that googlebot had visited my website fairly soon after I had uploaded my redesigned website, it took a while for the new details to appear in the search.

 

On the other hand, it took Bing about 3 days to show my updated pages and meta descriptions etc...

Uee a 301 redirect match on .htm to .html files - you will find that eventually your old pages get removed from Google.

 

BTW, google indexing your site takes seconds, but being included in Google's main index takes time. YOu could maybe get some decent backlinks to help?

 

 

Thankyou for the response, I am aware I can do domain redirects in googles webmaster tools but how do I do this for matching .htm to .html files?. I'm guessing its something I can do within the webhosts control panel or .htaccess, but not sure how.

 

Would appreciate a bit more info on how this is done.

 

cheers

Firstly, before you get into thta, how many pages do you have that need a redirect? If it's a handful just add manual 301 redirects in your htaccess file.

 

Off the top of my head you'd do something like below to redirect all requests for .htm files to their .html eqivalents (you may need to place this above other rewrite rules):

 

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine ON
 RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.htm$ http://www.yoursite.com$1.html
 #Other rules
</IfModule>

 

So, with that code in place, say www.site.com/page.htm was requested, a 301 redirect would immediately take them to www.site.com/page.html

 

 

Many thanks for this m8, will defo look into this at some point.

Many thanks for this m8, will defo look into this at some point.

 

Hi again,

 

I am having a bit of a nightmare with this problem. So far, I have tried the following code snippets and none of them are working:

 

As suggested by rallport

 

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine ON
 RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.htm$ http://www.mysite.com$1.html
 #Other rules
</IfModule>

 

As suggested on many sites regarding 301 redirects (justed tested with on one file):

 

redirect 301 /about.htm http://www.mysite.com/about.html

 

 

As suggested by 123-reg tech. support site:

 

RewriteEngine on

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteBase /

 

RewriteRule ^index\.htm$ index.html

 

Assuming one of these code snippets is correct, would it take affect instantly or does it take a while?

I suspect I need to get in touch with 123-reg and check if something needs to be enabled in apache, but before I do, any other help would be very much appreciated.

 

tia,

 

Andy

Edited February 11, 201115 yr by AndyDesigns

It should be instant though you might want to refresh the page by pressing Ctrl + F5 to make sure you're not getting a cached page.

 

Silly question but it's always good to check, you sure you've got Linux/Apache based hosting and not Windows/IIS?

It should be instant though you might want to refresh the page by pressing Ctrl + F5 to make sure you're not getting a cached page.

 

Silly question but it's always good to check, you sure you've got Linux/Apache based hosting and not Windows/IIS?

 

It was actually working, I made a very silly mistake with the new filename in the .htaccess file, a bit too embarassed to say exactly what I did, haha.