cscgal - 9:49 pm on Jul 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

I run a bulletin board/forum with about 800 individual threads in about 15 forums. Therefore, the entire site is about 900 pages. Recently, I used mod_rewrite to convert my .php looking URLs into static looking .html URLs.

For example,
/forums/viewtopic.php?t=100
was converted into
/forums/t100.html

Currently about 65% of my visitors come from search engines. When doing a site search at google, I found about 400 of my 900 or so pages were indexed (the php version of course, as I just implemented the html version the other day).

Was it really worth it for me to convert my site over to HTML URLs? All of the threads use only one variable in the URL (e.g. php?t=80 or php?t=500). I read that google usually indexes dynamic pages with one or two variables.

It's all said and done now, but I am just wondering whether it was worth it in your opinion. Google already has 400 of my php pages already in its index, afterall.

Note that with mod_rewrite, both the HTML as well as the PHP versions of each page are accessible, though all navigation/links throughout the site use the html version.