HTML to PHP

Changing SITE

[TomekLawreszuk]

Hi Everybody,

I am changing my site from html to php, any suggestion how to make it painless without loosing any ranking? New site will be database driven, should I make re-directions to new pages as some sub-pageses addresses will change.

Thank you

[bill]

Just have your server parse your HTML pages as PHP and you don't have to change anything as far as the search engines go.

[httpwebwitch]

bill's right.
it's a setting in the .htaccess file, "AddHandler" I think it is... easy to find & it's been discussed here many times, you'll probably find it in the PHP forum.

set up your site to parse *.html files with the PHP engine. then you can use PHP code with the .html extension, and none of your backlinks will break.

welcome to the world of PHP. you'll like it.

[TomekLawreszuk]

I totally agree, but I meant subpages like domain.com/item.htm?id=343?

Thank in advance,
Tomek

[2by4]

<< meant subpages like domain.com/item.htm?id=343? >>

that's a major mistake if you care about your pages ranking, I've tested this stuff with single item query strings versus static appearing .html urls and the .html urls skyrocketed the test pages to top 10 almost instantly. That was for some pretty decent search terms too. Before going static looking url the pages had pr 0 and didn't rank for anything, same content, only thing that changed was the url.

Use mod_rewrite and then reprogram the site so the url output creates clean urls. Plus query string urls are just ugly.

[TomekLawreszuk]

you mean domain.com/product_352.htm would be much better?
What should I do with the old pages if I change all the subpages to this mode?

Thanks in advance,
Tomek

[2by4]

<<< you mean domain.com/product_352.htm would be much better?
What should I do with the old pages if I change all the subpages to this mode? >>>

domain.com/product-352.htm is even better, the underscore is not treated as a word separator by the bots, especially google. Might as well get the 'product' file name in there. But yes, that's what I mean.

What old pages? the ones with query string urls? You mod_rewrite 301 them to the new format. Older pages, pre change? same thing, mod rewrite them. Make sure you do the rewrite rules correctly though, if you or your programmers aren't up on them, pay someone to do it for you, mistakes can be fatal, and it's not easy to do it right, correctly done the switch is almost invisible, I've done that on several sites when redoing them and saw no real change in serps at all.

[joaquin112]

Even better - if you truly care about long-term results, you should, in the database, make a "static_url" field in which every page has a static URL which can be set from virtually anything (example, the page's title) - that way you can have something like "product_blue_widget_1.html" now that's gold for the SES.

[TomekLawreszuk]

Thank guys for your help