I should say first of all that I'm a total noob with CMSMS and hope I'm posting in the right forum.

I have an existing static HTML site that is ranked high in google, always high on first page of Google for all search terms I expect my customers to use.

I intend to migrate to CMSMS for my next generation dynamic site how do I ensure that I do not damage my ranking when I migrate to the new CMSMS powered site?

The best would be if the page url's of your CMS pages are exactly the same as the current url's. You should use pretty url's with mod_rewrite. You can also use a "dummy" page extension like .html in cmsms, so the url's can look exactly the same.

If you can't get the url's to match exactly, you should make rewrite rules in your .htaccess file for every page on your website, that will redirect the old url to the new url with a 301 (moved permanently) redirect. The search engines will notice this and index the new url.

Thanks for your quick response, I guess it's more or less what I assumed but needed it confirmed in my mind that I can make the url's look the same in dynamically generated pages.

each of pages of CMSMS has an alias that you can define properly as you need, "nameofpage". It's independent of title and name of link.
The extension can be defined also
Intall a clean 1.10.1 on the server, or wamp into you pc and see about editing alias and title on existing page
Mod rewrite has to be activate

Again thanks for your help on this.

I now have a clean installation and have started experimenting, I have mod_rewrite on and the .htaccess file installed.

Created a new page 'about' which I need to to appear as 'about.htm' to search engine spiders, so I've made the page alias about.htm this produces the pretty url as 'about-htm'.

I'm afraid that I'm not very familiar with rewrite rules in .htaccess files, is it possible to change the rewrite rule to get the pretty url with the '.' instead of '-'.

However I've just noticed that it appears to be the CMS page editor that appears to be changing the alias '.' to '-'.

Further help would be much appreciated, it will be a disaster to rebuild my site and loose it's ranking maybe the 301 redirect is the only solution.

You are on the right way
You have to fill the alias with "about" only ( and not about.extension)
The extension html ( or others, eg. php ) has to be defined into the config.php, so add/fill the line with extension you need

eg.


hope to help
gp

Brilliant - works perfectly, thanks so much for your help.

I'm glad to hear about ...