Will Changing to '.php' from '.htm' Hurt SERP Rankings?

[Boston Condo Guy]

If my current index file is called 'index,htm', and I want to change it to 'index.php', will the search engines look at this as a "new" file/homepage, thus causing loss in rankings and similar corrections?

Is the answer to this question officially documented anywhere in Google, or has anyone had experience with this? Thanks!

[pcdoc]

I briefly navigated through your site, looking for link references to bostoncondoguy.com / index.htm and saw none.

Next, I used bostoncondoguy.com / index.htm in a google search and got this result:

Your search - bostoncondoguy.com / index.htm - did not match any documents.

good!


You've done an almost flawless job in maintaining URL integrity, even working on canonical addressing somewhat -- I can still delete http : // www. from your domain name and see http://bostoncondoguy.com/ in my browser's address bar.

So to answer your question, changing from htm to php should not affect your SERPs.