chg index.cfm to index.htm - negative affects?

[jl015]

My site right now has a coldfusion home page (index.cfm). There is no need to us the coldfusion file format any longer and everything would be fine but my site is being hosted on a shared cf server that goes down repeatedly. This means that if a visitor comes to my site when the cf server is down they get coldfusion error. Not good.

Despite this problem, google ranks my site very well.

I want to change my home page to a html file format (index.htm) BUT am I asking for trouble? I am concerned about trashing my google placement but I can't continue down this road with sporadic errors on my home page with the current cf file format.

Any suggestions short of biting the bullet and just switching to the html file?

And how will google placement treat this change in file format from index.cfm to index.htm? Will I see a drop in my placement on google?

Thanks much!

[ExposureTim]

I know this problem well. While I'm a long-time supporter of ColdFusion and use it likely excessively myself... when your host can't keep things up and running it makes for a bad situation.

Firstly, there is no difference between index.cfm and index.htm to Google in general. But, if they have indexed your file directly, then you'll want to be careful.

By directly, I mean, if they know yoursite.com/index.cfm exists rather than viewing it as just yoursite.com/ then be careful.

So, check your analytics reports or better yet check your log files to see which Googlebot is hitting when they crawl that page: the default or the file by name.
If it is crawling the default yoursite.com/ then you'll be OK to change without worry.

Whether you worry or not, to be safe add a 301 redirect from the index.cfm to the index.htm

GL

[jl015]

Thanks GL!

Couple of questions... must plead a bit of ignorance here but I just a minute ago signed up for analytics account. I hesitate adding the code as this site was designed for accessibility and I try to minimize the amount of javascript i have in the site. Until I added Adsense yesterday, there was no javascript on the site except in the my account area.

Is there a way to find out if the index file is being indexed by google outside of analytics?

Log files? are you referring to analytics log files?

Also, a tech at the web host company said that google might have heartburn with a 301 redirect within a site but not from one domain to another? Is there any truth to this? I would love to put a redirect on the index.cfm pointing to the new index.htm.

[vicyankees]

Another option is to setup a rewriting engine on the site to maintain the .cfm pages but to really be serving up .htm pages. The extension is irrelevant and you will notice many sites are actually getting rid of extensions all together.

[JohnW]

>many sites are actually getting rid of extensions all together.

Yep. IMO the solution here is to use a permanent redirect for any request for
domain.com/index.*
to
domain.com/

You should also think about the rest of the site to make sure no pages can load under more than one name.

[jl015]

Thanks JohnW.

Within my site the references to root are always "/", never /index.cfm, thank goodness for that. I am waiting on analytics to start producing reports for a number of things one being is the site indexed by .com vs the index page.

This is an excellent forum!

[vicyankees]

The site:domain.com will tell you what your site is indexed as on all of the major search engines. You should also create an account for the Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Search Tools to see how they have indexed your site, how they crawl and any errors they are coming across.

[ExposureTim]

Is there a way to find out if the index file is being indexed by google outside of analytics?

Yes - in fact Google Analytics will not help you with this... GA only tracks human traffic to a website, so you'll need to refer to logs.

Log files? are you referring to analytics log files?

Well, I wouldn't call them analytics log files, but you're on the right track. I'm talking about the traffic logs that your web hosting company stores containing all traffic data. The information very raw so you'll likely want to use something like ClickTracks or another reporting tool to generate reports... but for this purpose you could actually open the files as text and search for the 'Googlebot' User-Agent looking for the most recent record associated with your home page (thus to determine if its a a '/' not '/index.cfm')

[lazlozand]

Originally Posted by ExposureTim

Whether you worry or not, to be safe add a 301 redirect from the index.cfm to the index.htm
GL

Agreed - 301 is the way to go.


-LZ