SOLVED - Does swapping cmsms '.html' filenames for old html affect search eng?

[KoalaBlue]

Hi there - can anyone help?

I've read a lot of the forum but don't know exactly the phrases to search for

I have a live html website with good google ranking on the html pages.

I have just finished a duplicate site built with CMSMS, for the same domain.

I want to delete the old html pages, and just have the CMSMS website.

I realise I need to go into config.php and change the setting to extensions of '.html'.

My question is - do search engines keep the 'memory' of my html pages, and will my cmsms '.html' pages continue to have their rankings?

I am not sure how the whole CMS / php / database works in comparison to flat html pages.

Can anyone offer simple explanations for me?  Pretty please?

Thanks in advance!

[Pierre M.]

Search engines remember the URLs where they have seen indexable content. So when the URL changes the ranking is lost. You should remember that a web site is a mapping between URLs and content. Try to keep you valuable URLs. The ".html" suffix is a smart way of doing it when migrating an old plain html website. Yes, you should keep the same URLs if you care your ranking.

Please note that is is not a matter of ".html" suffix to "affect search engine". It is just that if you change the suffix, you break the URL.

BTW, please read Google guidelines for webmasters. Whatever the suffix the search engine cares of the URL (presence of key words related to the content... eh mapping again .

PM

[KoalaBlue]

BONJOUR PIERRE!

Thank you for your explanations.

I have now changed the config.php to '.html', I've copied all the old html files onto cd and deleted them from the server, and the new pages are resolving perfectly with their names exactly the same as the old pages.

All fixed!  I'm very happy! 

Have a great weekend