Using 301 Redirect for only a few pages - impact?

[nnowakow]

I would like to display an RSS newsfeed on my site and would like to use server side scripting so that search engines may crawl it (as oppose to java script). I am only planning to put the RSS feeds on 6 pages of my site, including the main home page. To do this, I will be required to change the suffix of these 6 pages, including the main home page from ".html" to ".asp". I was going to do a 301 redirect, but have read that google has some problems with it.

If I am only redirecting 6 pages including home page, will google still have problems with it? Can anyone tell me the pros and cons? Thanks so much!

[toby_bird]

From what I've seen with one of my sites that recently moved to using SSI and 301 for redirect is that the Google bot will show up - see the 301 - continue indexing and then come back in 20 minutes or so and index the redirect. So far, I have not experienced any problems however, I'd like to know as well if there is a better way to handle these types of redirects.

[alienzhavelanded]

A properly coded 301 redirect will be exactly what most of the spiders will want to see. That is the best way to let them know a page has moved. The downside to this is doing it in an HTML page isn't all that feasable. However if you're using an Apache server, you can use an .htaccess file.

[caromero1965]

Don't know who your host is, but if they're even moderately flexible they can change the processing of HTML files so that they are processed the same as ASP files. My host did this for me years ago, no problem... just had to ask. If you want more details on eactly what to do, contact me offline-- I can't immediately remember what to do or find doc on it, but it's a simple configuration change in application mappings in IIS. Performance is impacted somewhat but it's not that bad... in the current version of Windows IIS and the handler for ASP can very quickly determine whether a page is really an ASP page or just an HTML page and serve the HTML pages just about as fast as with static pages.

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[TechEvangelist]

Configuring IIS to parse HTML like ASP pages is the easiest way to do this, if your hosting company will cooperate. Some may, but others will not reconfigure a server for a unique situation.

We recently did a complete rework of a site where directories and page names were all changed. It was basically a complete restructuring. The site was on a Linux server, so we set up the 301 redirects in the .htaccess file. It took Google about one week to change all of the old links in their data to the new versions. Other SEs took two to four months. From my experience, Google is the most responsive to 301 redirects.