How best to let Google know I have changed website

SiriusB

SiriusB

SiriusB

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16 Dec 2005
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Manchester
I have a website at http://smp.aeternum.co.uk that is currently in .xhtml

My site appears quite high in Google when using the right search [I am rather surprised at that too, site has only been up a month].

However, as my site is constantly being updated/corrected and added to, I am in the process of moving it over to .php. This will allow me to simplify my code and also make it easier to add/remove stuff [using an Admin panel of some description].

However, because the pages will undoubtedly change and have new names, how well will Google handle this, and should I do anything?

Basically I don't want people clicking on a link in Google to find the page no longer exists.

This is all quite new to me, so any help would be wonderful.
 
Firstly, redirect with permanently moved status code (301) - set it in the HTTP headers when someone tries to access *.xhtml.

Alternatively, let Apache parse .xhtml as PHP.

Also, HTML > XHTML, and the .xhtml extension is rather useless, why use it in the first place?

Finally, this is why nice URIs like /about/ and /contact/ are practical, not just for rankings, ease of memorisation etc.

Conclusively, read the above.
 
Ahh, didn't consider a redirect.

I used .xhtml because my pages are written in strict XHTML 1.1. The validator gives a warning if I don't use .xhtml. I don't want warnings! :p

Is Google able to tell the difference between different pages through the *.php?=contact and so on?

All my pages have the same template, so all I need is one PHP page and I can include the content from flat files [or DB].
 
Google will re-crawl quite regularly so let the pages die. My site gets crawled every few days, and they remove dead links very quickly.
 
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