How to properly abandon mod rewrite?

[mynewco]

Hi,

We've done mod-rewrite to our .php files to show .htm files several years ago for SEO purposes.

My question is, doing this has become a hassle for adding new pages, etc. and I'd like to make a clean break with the .htm and move to their real file names and or directories (e.g. company.htm --> /company/ ).

What kind of ranking penalty am I looking at if we switch? We're a small company with billion dollar competitors so a rank loss would be fairly devastating.

I assume I'd need to do 301 redirects for all of the old file names (obviously yes for the change from page to directories) but for each individual page?

Thanks,

Matt

[Nick_Ker]

Maybe I am missing something, but wouldn't a rewrite that removes all the .php instances solve this problem site-wide? Or are you doing it file by file and leaving some pages as-is?

Something like this in your .htaccess should do it:

to remove php:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php

or to change to htm site-wide:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([^.]+).htm$ $1.php [L]

Another way is to name the files with .htm and use this in htaccess to send htm through your PHP handler:

AddType application/x-httpd-php htm html php
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .htm .html

If you use rewrites like those, you won't be able to also use 301s for the affected URIs as it would probably create a redirect loop.

In a perfect world, you should 301 redirect any page that changes if you stop using the php to htm rewrites. If there are simply too many for this to be practical, you could just redirect the most important pages and leave out any that may not have very many inbound links pointing to it. What I will often do in cases like this is set up the redirects for the important pages, then keep an eye on Google Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools will show you the 404 errors and where they found the links. Then you can pick the ones that have a lot of links and 301 those a few at a time. Tedious, but if you do that in your spare time, eventually you will get them all fixed.

If you can implement a "set it and forget it" rewrite so you don't have to add a new rewrite for each file, you won't have to worry about 301 redirecting all those old pages.

Otherwise, there really shouldn't be any major loss of rank from dropping the file types.

All that said, there isn't much of a reason to remove the file type extensions, other than to shorten addresses by a few characters and just look a little cleaner.