Hi Guys
Many thanks for the advice
hopefully one day I will be able to help people in these newsgroup as well
instead of being a newbie

Regards
Ian
"Eric Johnston" <nospam@redyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
news:SHKce.9843$z%5.3071@fe1.news.blueyonder.co.uk ...
>
> "Ian Harris" <websolutions@NOSPAMclara.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:42733f2b$0$328$cc9e4d1f@news.dial.pipex.com.. .
>> Hi
>> I have updated a site that is already listed in the search engines .
>> and gets high ranking but this is based on .htm pages
>> The problem is the prevoius site, had page file names like this index.htm
>> and products.htm
>> The new site has page file names like this index.html and products.html .
>> do I need to change the html back to htm page file names
>>
>> Regards
>> Ian
>
> By changing the file names you are giving the search engines a whole new
> learning job to do, so expect a temporary setback, particularly in respect
> of searches that might have displayed old deep pages in the results.
> Eventually you may recover - much will depend on the quality of content of
> the new pages, compared with the old. If the new pages are really good you
> may find them listed high for while to see if people like them.
>
> If you have incoming links direct to certain individual pages try
> particularly to have those page names, and their relevent content,
> retained.
>
> Avoid mention of either index.htm and index.html anywhere on your site
> pages and use instead links to the url alone, like http://www.clara.co.uk/
> If you already have incoming links to index.htm or index.html try to get
> the originators to simplify to the url only and if this can't be done then
> make sure such pages actually exist, even if the lower priority one of
> them just says "click here to go to the proper home page". Your server
> will send out a page if you ask for http://www.clara.co.uk/ The actual
> page file name sent out will depend on an arbitary list of filenames, in
> priority order, hidden in the server config file. e.g. index.html,
> index.htm, default.htm, default.html etc
> Best regards, Eric.
>