Changing Page Extenstions

[jacksghost]

Hi all,

I have a 10 year old website done in Classic ASP, which is fast becoming outdated and we are going to convert it to PHP so all of our pages would be changed from a '/page.asp' extension to a '/page.php' extension.  I am familiar with the need to setup 301 redirects for this and I understand there will probably be a short term drop in our Google rankings.

Naturally, I don't want to have to go through this again in the future so here is my question.  Is having NO page extension, like '/aboutus/history' the wave of the future?  Does having no page extension effect SEO at all?

I have seen more websites using this technique in 2013 goes on so I am thinking this is the way we should plan our site update.  I haven't looked into how to actually do this yet, but it would seem to make sense to me so that if we needed to change from PHP to say .NET or something else later on, we would not have to do 301 redirects again or have another drop in our rankings.

Do any of you have an opinion or experience with this?

[FedeEinhorn]

I have personally done this in the past, it didn't affect at all my rankings and it could even be seen as a benefit for your users.

I guess you are going with an Apache web server, make sure to set 301 redirects from the .php versions to the [no extension] URL (via the .htaccess).

Even if the user types index.php, you should create a rewrite rule to remove that .php and set a 301 in the process.

Hope that helps!