Folder Or File. Google Confused? Options

[mewm]

Hello.

I currently rewriting my companys shopsystem, and i've ran into a problem.
As for now, we are number one on google, so that's not the problem. But to get even better i've been asked to rewrite the URI handling system.
Right now it goes like domain.com/domain/shop/show_product.php?product_id=CCW-2132&maingroup=manufactur
But i'm building it to domain.com/manufacture/product_name
BUT, does the SE care if the have an extension. Like .html or .htm? I mean, when the bot crawls our site, does it then ignore the "link" because it thinks it's a folder?

I hope you understand.

Thank you on beforehand.

[1dmf]

The SE's don't care what appears at the end of a URL in terms of display results, as lonmg as it gets some results and a 200 OK status code.

Think about not putting index.html on the end of a domain's URL, the home page still shows doesn't it?

Though if you already have no.1 ranking , if you don't manage your redirection correctly as you are changing the URI's, you will lose your rankings!

[mewm]

Yep i'm aware of that. We are planning to test the complete system on new shop troughout 3 months before upgrading our own shop.
I'll have to code some sort of adapter so "old" indexed links will works as well.

[Randy]

Changing the URLs is going to have little or no effect on rankings. Other than possibly causing a drop in rankings and traffic, depending upon exactly how you're handling the url swap.

Changing the URLs for no good non-seo reason is the single biggest mistake I see people make. URLs have nothing to do with rankings as long as the urls can in fact be spidered. So if they're already being spidered and you're making the change for SEO reasons rather than legitimate business reasons I'd have to say you're probably making a mistake.