I changed my file extensions, but google hasn't changed.

Question

Well, I changed my file extensions to .shtml and google still has them indexed as .html. I've tried uploading a sitemap and other things to google webmaster tools but with no luck. Is there any other way I can force google to crawl my site? Im guessing thats the only way the links will update.

Answer 1

Google crawls the web periodically, just wait for a while, it will re-index your site.

Answer 2

You can try setting your change frequency to always or something more frequent to get indexed sooner. I make no guarantees though. Otherwise, you're just going to have to wait like the rest of us.

Answer 3

Have you set up redirection from the old .html filenames to the new .shtml filenames? You should do that - Google will pick up your changes more quickly (because it doesn't have to discover all your pages again) and it will transfer PageRank from the old URLs to the new ones. There are a million descriptions on the net about how to do that.

But having said that, can't you just keep the .html filenames and do some trickery with .htaccess (or equivalent; you don't say which web server you're using) to make the .html files respect SSI directives? This:

AddType text/html .html
AddHandler server-parsed .html

ought to do it for Apache.

Answer 4

If your website gets some traffic then there's a good chance that Googlebot has already visited. My website isn't big and I get crawled daily. You can be pretty sure that Google already knows your new URLs.

The thing is that Google only updates it's indexes every 3-4 weeks or so. There are a few exceptions to that, such as regularly updated blogs and forums where new threads and posts get picked up very fast. But usually it can take a few weeks until your new URLs are in the main seach index.

Oh and a tip: If you have rewrite rules to redirect your old .html addresses to your new .shtml addresses, make sure you use 301 redirects and not 302 redirects. With 301 redirects, Google will assign the "link juice" that the old URL has to the new URL. With 302 redirects it does not do that and you could possibly loose pagerank.