Site rebuild without HTML extension = broken links?

[seozoltan]

I have a client and his site is pure HTML. He made huge amount of link building with some hundreds of links point to example.com/target.HTML

Now we decided to use WordPress with the same site structure.

If we use the exact same URLs but without the HTML ending will it cause broken links?

Is there any best practice for this kind of change?

Many thanks for any idea!

[wickedsunny1]

Hello,

You can setup your wordpress urls to end with .html as well so you can keep the url same.

If you use other sort of permalinks, then yes it will be considered as broken link. but you can put a 301 redirect using htaccess and can prevent loss of link juice and broken link issue :}

My suggestion would be to keep .html strucutre for urls even in wordpress. but u want to switch use a 301 redirect!

hoep that helps.

[JarnoNijzing]

Peter

Letting wordpress end all the url's with .html is indeed a possibility. Another possibility is using your .htaccess file to accept different options so that extension doesn't even matter. In that way is doesn't matter is there is .html or .php / .asp or whatever behind it.

Look at this article in the community for more about HTACCESS:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/htaccess-file-snippets-for-seos

It's really great stuff.

Hope this helps

Regards

Jarno