Changing the URL for a page

[Justin]

Lets say I have a URL that is

ohiostatepoker.com/tid_12345

And I want to change it so I can put some keywords into it...

ohiostatepoker.com/columbus-poker-tournament

If I do this throughout my whole site will I mess up all of my rankings that I have now? Im looking to move to the top of the list with some of my keywords and I think this will help out, but I dont want to mess anyhting up beyond repair.

[J S]

you'll want to research how to do a proper 301 re-direct. There are some threads in this forum talking about it. It can be done, we did it for some of our pages with positive results. Just be sure you do it correctly or I believe you can be penalized for duplicate content and other negatives.

there is some good advice buried in this section on doing this. Others certainly know better than I, but I believe you need to re-create the page with the new name and then put the re-direct on the old page to point to the new page.

[PPP]

"will I mess up all of my rankings"

Yes, at first they will go down, then they should go up due to the more useful URL. This assumes you do a 301 from the old URL to the new one.

[mikebrad]

On the same note, what about changing extensions of pages? Does that affect you the same way?

Let's say, for instance, I want to change my entire site from .htm to .php

[PPP]

It changes everything, unless they are index files where the linking was done correctly in the first place... like you replace index.htm with index.php and all your links were to site.com/section/