Changing page .htm to .cfm / search engine indexes?

Question

I have a central page on a site that has been up as
domain/page.htm for more than 10 years. It is listed multiple times
on popular search engines, and I am sure it's bookmarked by its
users. The page is already on a CF site, and I would like to add to
it a small cf look-up; but if I change it to .cfm, will I lose all
my www search-engine links and search-history? If I change
domain/page.htm to be a relocation pointer to domain/page.cfm, will
the relocation usage blacklist the page with the web-crawlers? Is
there another approach?

Answer 1

I think a better solution (especially from an SEO point of
view) is to use application.cfm or even better application.cfc to
capture the people that enter in on that page - then redirect them
to your new index.cfm.
You should probably use a proper header for this too instead
of simply using a cflocation. This way, search engines will soon
learn that the old .htm should no longer be used and has infact
been moved to a new resource .cfm.
<cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved Permanently"
/>
<cfheader name="Location" value="
http://www.example.com/index.cfm"
/>
<cfabort />
Use some IF, ELSE logic in your application file to do this.
Hope that helps,
thanks.
Michael.