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Technical SEO Oct 09, 2026

Removing .cfm extensions from URLs without breaking old links

Legacy coldfusion site, every URL ends in .cfm and we'd like clean URLs for the relaunch. Is a rewrite rule plus 301s from the old versions enough to hold rankings?
remove file extension
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mayur_seo Oct 16, 2026
inshya
You need two rules working together: an internal rewrite so /page quietly serves page.cfm, and a 301 that sends anyone requesting page.cfm to /page. The trap is the redirect loop. If the 301 rule matches on the rewritten URL, the server bounces between the two forever. Make the redirect check the original request the browser sent (THE_REQUEST on Apache, or the matching condition in IIS URL Rewrite if you're on Windows) so it only fires when .cfm was actually in the address bar. After that, update your internal links, canonicals and sitemap to the new URLs so Google isn't constantly hitting redirects, and keep the redirects in place for good.
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