.html extension

[Mattymar]

My new client's original web developer set up many pages with .html extensions.  My plan is to turn most of these into php pages.  Also, I think the .html extension displaying in the browser is just ugly so I want to drop the .html extension from those pages that remain.  I know how to do this with .htaccess, but my question is should I 301 redirect all the .html pages to the page without an extension.  (For example, should I redirect www.example.com/page.html to www.example.com/page)

I don't know how many, in any, links there are out there to these pages, but I'm guessing not many.  I'm sure it's not that big a deal but I was wondering if it would be worth the time to do that for the pages I change.

[AndieF]

Absolutely! You can do a blanket "301 any page with .html at the end to the same page without it" rule with .htaccess to save you time and energy once you've done your renaming process.

This neat little bit of code (found at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5730092/how-to-remove-html-from-url) should do the trick nicely.

<code>RewriteEngineOnRewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-f
RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d
RewriteRule^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301]</code>

[Mattymar]

Great! I think I'll give that a whirl.

[BlueprintMarketing]

http://www.seomofo.com/wordpress/seo-friendly-permalinks.html

http://yoast.com/fixed-category-subpage-titles-and-a-fix-in-permalink-redirect-plugin/

http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-url-permalink/

Hope this helps,

Tom

[Mattymar]

Thanks Thomas but this site only uses wordpress for the blog.  The rest of the site is what I'm concerned with right now.