shtml pages and old htm pages

reworked a site from bog standard htm pages over to shtml pages with a SSI for the header and menu, so far so good

just starting to get a bit twitchy about when Google will start to show the shtml pages, still showing only the old htm pages when I do a site: search

the content on the htm and shtml page is almost identical, is that going to cause any problems with Google re identical content?

I'm tempted to scrub the htm pages off the server but they still appearing in search results and so on, the home page is the same name btw

anyone have any thoughts?

or should I just stop twitching and wait it out? been about two months ish since the switch

it's the site in my sig, if it matters, thanks

Just give it time, it should eventually clear itself up. Are the old files still there? Like if you go to one of the old pages, does it still load? I'd guess the best thing to do would be to remove them so they get removed from the search results for being dead links.

or better still, set the server up to redirect (permanent, 301 off the top of my head?) to the new versions, then google will find them.

When I converted my pages to use server side includes I just updated the existing .htm pages and added a line into my .htaccess file telling the server to parse them for SSI.

AddHandler server-parsed .htm

I asked about this at the time and the general suss was that a redirect was a bit of a lazy patch and getting the html pages parsed for ssi was too, go clean and do it properly

my main concern is whether google is bothered by two versions of the same page with different names, the old htm files are all still there but not linked in any way to the 'new' site, google still shows them but only because it hasn't updated it's index, is that right?

righto, after eventually trying a bit harder I realised that google had indexed and listed all the shtml pages but hid them as they were similair content to the 'old' html pages

whacked the html pages and the sthml pages all appeared good as gold

ta