Ranking implications of asp to php

[burcot]

Could anyone point me to a WebmasterWorld link on the ranking effects of changing an existing site from asp to php.

If anyone has done this and would share the experience - I would really appreciate it.

Cheers
Mark

[joaquin112]

Changing your complete site from HTML to PHP will yield bad SEO results in lose of ranking for a couple of months. My advice is to parse PHP in HTML documents to avoid lose of ranks and a better URL overall.

[SiteTechnician]

joaquin

Can you elaborate on this? I have a site that changed from cfm to php and has plummeted in the SERPS, but only on google. From top 10 to 30+. I've been trying to determine if it's due to big daddy, a canonical/dupe content issue (which has been around for years, but may be treated differently by BD) or more aggressive optimization on the new site (strictly white hat, but aggressive).

I've wondered about the switch to php but have found no info. (I'm the SEO, the developer chose php). What are the pitfalls with php? Since the new site has gone up, the php pages have not been indexed at all. They all show PR0 and cannot be found in G by searching the URL.

thanks.

[tedster]

When you changed the extension, you changed every url on your site -- and search engine ranking is calculated by url. There is no other technical way to define "a page".

You should gradually recover. I'm amazed that Yahoo and MSN have not been a problem for you so far -- in fact, I'm mysitfied! Maybe BigDaddy slowed down Google's indexing of your new urls (likely) and the others ripped right through your new urls so quickly that you didn't motive any problem (possible, but still amazing).

[jatar_k]

just turn on php parsing for the asp extension, then no swapping urls

no real need to change the pagenames, just change how your server parses them

the actual technology change does nothing at all