How do I best handle a minor URL change?

[Andrea.G]

My company is about to complete an upgrade to our website but part of this will be changing the URLs slightly. Mainly the .aspx suffix will be dropped off the pages that we're most worried about. The current URLs will automatically redirect to the new pages, will this be enough or will there be an SEO impact? If it helps the site is www.duracard.com and the product pages are the ones we want to keep ranked. For instance if someone searches for "plastic gift cards" our page '<cite>https://www.duracard.com/products/plastic-gift-cards.aspx</cite>' is #3 and we want to make sure it stays that way once we change it to 'https://www.duracard.com/products/plastic-gift-cards'. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

[Adam_Cochran]

When ever we talk site structure I love to refer to Rand's Intro SEO slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-seo-5003433) slides 46 & 47 in this case if I remember correctly.

The basic mantra to remember is that when it comes to URL's - keep it simple.

Google loves simple, clean and meaningful URLs and dropping the .aspx extension should actually serve as a plus long term. While Google may initially rank the old page depending on its indexing and crawls just make sure that the .aspx pages are re-directing with 301 redirects (not 302) and eventually they should swap out entirely.

In all the years I've worked in SEO I've only ever seen sites improve their ranking by cleaning their URL's like this. Just make sure to 301 and you're all set!

[Andrea.G]

Thanks Adam, that's pretty much what I thought. The owner of the company is pretty paranoid and I'm a bit of a novice at this so I wanted to double check since this isn't a full domain change. I know the pages will be redirected but I'm waiting to hear back from the coder that they'll be 301s.