changing from html to shtml... will PR start from scratch?

I am changing a site to be all shtml in order to take out lots of repeated code so that the pages are more SEO friendly.

I just thought of something though... when I delete all the html pages and am left with just the shtml, will this in effect be like starting over with a whole new site, where I will have to wait a couple months to be noticed at all by the SEs?

I hope not! I have thought I should possibly leave both the html and shtml in (they function independently of each other) and wait for the shtml portions to start getting spidered... I could create a link to the shtml sitemap on the index.html page, for example.

Any advice is appreciated. thanks, Emily

When you change the files, do a 301 redirect from the old files to the new one.

The 301 redirect tells google that the page's located has changed permanenetly... thus google will transfer over the PR and backlinks from the old page to the new page in due time.

And so then I am right about needing to keep the old html files up and working until I start to see the shtml files show up in google? What about the other browsers, do they understand the 301 redirect too? ~Thanks

NO!!! As soon as you change the files over, make sure that the .html files are gone totally, that only the .shtml files that replace them remain and that (if you've done this) the old .html files have been 301 redirected to the .shtml pages.

The reason for this is simple. If the html pages are still there when the shtml pages are there as well, they'll both be indexed and you'll be hit with a duplicate content filter which, depending on how many pages it is, will drop your site like a rock!

Just make sure that everything on the site is unique and nothing is a cpy and you'll be fine. It will take the .shtml pages a bit of time to get their rank back, but they will get there sooner then if it was a purely new site.

Oy vey I hope I didn't screw up our PR cuz I'd been uploading the shtml files as I created them. I just took them all off for now until I find my .htaccess file. Thanks!