Changing from static pages

will this hurt?

[potbelly]

Hi, i`m still a bit new so bear with me.

My site is doing quite well,(6 mths old) it gets regularly crawled by G and i am starting to get some good rankings for some of my keywords and content.

My problem is this, I now need to convert the site from static pages to db driven. My precious content that has done well up to now will be hidden away, only to be called up when requested by the user.

How will this effect my overall ranking and the ability of G to be able to index the site fully?

Thanks.

[g1smd]

You can still serve the content using the same URLs by setting the server to parse .htm pages as containing PHP code.

You can also use re-write rules to change dynamic URLs into URLs that look like a folder structure.

Google need never know that you did anything to your site at all.

[hazardtomyself]

Our site of 1,000+ pages were static and I had the same fear when migrating to a db driven dynamic site. I just couldn't keep up with manually making changes. One static page (which already had an .asp extention) which had 300 lines of html code now had 10 lines of code, drawing from 5 include files.

Position is important to us. It's been 3 months and our pages never missed a beat.

[sun818]

A popular method for presenting content is to query from a database, but present the file names as if they were static HTML files. Many use mod_rewrite (for Apache) or ISAPI_Rewrite (for IIS). I'm currently restructing my site to have the same static URLs as it currently does, but make the back-end from an online database. It is much easier to maintain.

[potbelly]

Thanks for all the replies and advice. I`ve googled around a bit and it is now officially 18th in line of jobs to do.
Ta.

[rfgdxm1]

>Google need never know that you did anything to your site at all.

Yep. A little server side magic can work wonders. Also, it should be considered that Google isn't the only SE out there. I wouldn't want to bet a site that put bread on my table on the fact that Inktomi, ask.com, etc. would be able to handle URLs with variables as well as traditional static looking URLs.

[nuevojefe]

rfgdxm1,

Very true.

These days keeping old URLs seems to be the way to go whenever possible. Since it's nearly always possible why not?

It's also benificial for those with bookmarks to those URLs or links to them.