Question about changing page names

[ucladave]

I've got one site that I currently run on a predesigned template hosting plan. They give me 5 pages that I must edit/create online. I am now starting to use frontpage and would like to change the hosting to use my pages, but here is my question...

Currently the pages are named mydomain/wst_page2.html and mydomain/wst_page3.html etc. I've got good rankings for a couple keywords on the serch engines and am wondering if I will lost all that if I change the page names to something else. Anyone know about this?

thanks

[CAZ]

This may be simplistic, not even sure if it will work. Seems to me i did it this way aftert i lost a diskdrive to get a site back in FP.

Visit your website online, then file/save as to your desktop, this should download the entire site to a file on your desktop, then open frontpage, create new web and then create a "new page from existing" for each page that you have in the original.
once you have recreated your new web in FP you can then upload it via FP to your new hosting company.

As far as changing the names of the pages, if its not broke...
I would just leave them alone.

Others may have better ideas
Whats the site?

[PPP]

You can leave them with the dorky names because they do well now.

You could change the names to more sensible ones and think about the longterm, which includes a short time when rankings go down somwhat until the new pages are properly seasoned.

You in it for the long haul, or for the next three weeks?

If you change the pages, 301 the old locations to the new locations and you won't miss any traffic and will eventually pass along the pagerank and algo value of the old pages to the new ones.

[ucladave]

ok thanks for the tips, Im not sure whether to bother with changing the names I guess, seems like it doesnt really make a lot of difference one way or the other. Any advantage to calling the tournament page tournaments.html over the donkey names??

[PPP]

yes