Changing .html file names and SEO ranking help/advice.

[matius]

Say your original site was built in English. You then had all of that content translated, and a new mirror site was built and uploaded in French. So you have both of these sites online for several months.

All is well except for that the individual HTML file names for the French site are still in English. The original files were used as templates to build the translated site...

My problem is, how do I change the individual .html file names (products.html to produits.html) and not have any trouble with my rankings in the search engine, or at least to have as minimal effect as possible?

If I changed each file locally and uploaded them all hell would pretty much break loose. So any advice on how to minimize the impact would be greatly appreciated.

[Johan007]

Personally I would leave them alone however you may want to stick a 301 Redirect on all the pages and replace the content with "This page has moved please click here".

[Manish Pandey]

hmmm...you want to change the file name to french...a bit techie stuff...ok lets see...well the only answer that pop up in my mind is the 301 redirect to a new page...product.html to its french counter part...or take the pain and change them locally...