Changing from htm - php - how does Google react?

Changing file extensions - will google penalise you?

[Turboteeth]

Hi,

I have been developing a site of mine of the past few Months, and due to development - silly maybe, I have changed from .htm > .php > .asp extensions. The site appears to have picked up a penalty and I can see no other reason why.

Could Google be penalising sites which change in 'structure' maybe to stop people picking up detagged domains with high PR values?

I'm just a little apprehenisve about changing another site from .htm > .php - incase it too gets the chop for a while - Or am I just being paranoid?

any advice is greatly appreciated. :)

[Compdoctor]

I'm not wise yet, but I did jsut this, and my traffic droped big time. I then when back end and changed all my links to html format so that the text could be read off of them. I understand that Goggle reads php, but when my traffic droped I changed. Seems to have worked out so far

[HarryM]

Are you providing redirects?

If Google is looking for "your-domain/filename.html" it will get a 404 "File not found" error message, unless it is redirected to "your-domain/filename.php"

It may assume your site has ceased to exist, and that the current version is a new site.

[taxpod]

Even if Google doesn't think your site is gone, it is being troubled by finding so many missing pages. Remember that PR is a page phenomenon not a site one. If you have a ".htm" page that is PR5 because of inbound links, changing the extension and leaving nothing behind means that you have just lost a PR5 and you now have a brand new page with no inbound links. Assuming that the only links are your own, this should rectify itself in the next update, hopefully.

Another item worth mentioning is that for some reason, dynamically generated pages seem to take longer to get into the index. Say I have two pages linked to from my home page. One of these pages is ".htm" and the other is ".asp?variable-1" - the .htm page might show up in the next update while the .asp? page might take two or three months. I've seen this happen several thousand times but I have no explanation for it. Others have noted a similar occurence.

[jamesa]

Another option is to keep the .htm extension, and configure the webserver to parse .htm pages through PHP. For example in Apache:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .php3 .htm

Here's a related thread about going from static to dynamic pages: [webmasterworld.com ]

[seindal]

The correct way of moving pages is to send 301 (Moved Permanently) for alle the old addresses, redirecting to the new. Google will pick that up just fine, though it can take up to two months if your timing is unfortunate.

René

[Turboteeth]

Great! - Thanks for the info on this, it wil certainly help for my next venture - hopefully the penalty on the affected site will disperse shortly.

Thanks for the link Jamesa, although I'll have to make the monetry contribution for that link to work ;)

HarryM - No I've not been giving specific redirects, which is my fault - only a customised 404 page with a link to the home page.

"being troubled" - hey that makes Google sound so 'human' - well I suppose we should make the bot's life a little more simple by seindal's suggestion!

Thanks for all the help -

Cheers,

Matt.