Switched from html to php

Not coming up in any search engines anymore

[erfdoop]

We recently built a new site at the same URL as the old one and switched the site from html to php and now none of the pages are coming up on ANY search engine. It has been about 8 weeks. The pages that are still on our site in html (blogs and some archived stuff) still come up. Also, our Alexa rating has dropped hundreds of thousands, even though we are getting more visitors than ever.

The site stile says "beta" at the end of the URL, could that have something to do with it?

Sorry, I'm not the Webmaster, but the owner of the business.

Thanks for your help.

[Philosopher]

So the page extensions all changed from .html or .php?

If so, that is the reason, it will take the engines a while to pick up all of the new pages and then get them to rank. I know it's been 8 weeks, but it could easily take another month or two or longer.

In the eyes of the engines, the entire site changed. That can have a dramatic affect on rankings for a while.

You may have been better off using .htaccess to keep the .html extensions and have them parsed as php, but it's likely too late for that.

[caveman]

erfdoop, I would suggest as a starting point that you find out more about the pages. Are the URL's the same except for the page extensions? Or, did the entire structure of the site change? And did the page templates change? In other words, what changed exactly?

Also if the pages stayed mainly the same except for the extensions changing, are your old pages now being redirected to the new ones? And how exactly are they being redirected? There are good and bad ways to go about this.

If the pages stayed mainly the same and there are redirects and they are being handled properly, you could get lucky and start reappearing soon.

One last thing: Notice any difference in how the major SE's are handling this so far?

[erfdoop]

Thanks for the replies. The entire structure of the site changed. It was just a really bad html site that I had made, but it was getting lots of visitors and search engine hits. I really don't know much about php, but when you type in the URL, it automatically adds "beta" as an extension, the other pages contain extensions like this:
beta/index.php?content=CD&art_id=(anumberhere)

The only thing I can think of, without much knowledge of this subject, is that it's either taking a lot of time to reindex the site, or that "beta" extension on the homepage is messing up the robots?

All the pages with articles, etc., are not on the new site. It's a totally different site...

[caveman]

We recently built a new site at the same URL as the old one and switched the site from html to php...

All the pages with articles, etc., are not on the new site. It's a totally different site...

I think you've said it is an entirely new site design at the same domain as your old site, right?

So before, let's say that you had a page about green widgets. Has that page been replaced with an entirely new page, not looking like the old one? And are the old pages deleted? Are there redirects, e.g. from the old green widgets page to the new green widgets page? Or is the structure even more substantially changed than that?

If the site really consists of all new pages, new page styles, etc. then you might not see it for a very long time in G**gle. The problem goes by different names (freezer, deepfreeze, sandbox), but what it means is that G is not showing many new sites, at all, for now. Some say this applies to only brand new sites, but I've seen and heard of a significant number of sites vanishing from G's SERP's as a result of doing what you've just done...wholesale site changes, especially if redirects are not handled well.

OTOH, it's possible that G is just reading what you've done as having added a lot of duplicate content, which is a more fixable issue. Either way, you need to learn about redirects. More on that below...

As for Y*hoo!, if you have not redirected old pages to new ones, or at least deleted the old green widgets page, then Y! may interpret the old and new green widgets pages as duplicate content and your site would suffer as a result. If this is true of the entire site, then get your Webmaster involved, read up on converting old sites to new ones, and read up on redirects.

Best I can offer without knowing a lot more. Try this too [WebmasterWorld.com], in case I'm missing something...which happens from time to time. :-)

[incrediBILL]

Never Never Never change page names! Heck, I've got page names I've kept since 1997 just so I didn't lose the position of that page and amazingly those ancient pages still get 1,000s of links a month all these years later from bookmarks, links on ancient web sites, and search engines.

You can fake the old page names with web server rewrite rules that serve up the new pages using the old page names. I also used to just leave the pages as-is with a javascript redirect embedded, which allowed the search engine to continue to crawl the page but the visitor would encounter the javascript that would transport him/her to the new content. However, now that google appears to be reading javascript that trick may be bad.

[erfdoop]

Thanks Caveman. That's really good info... however, I've been looking through the forums and saw a post that made me do a "site:my url.com" search on Google. Before I was just searching for the text (again, I'm a novice). The pages actually do show up on the Google search, but when you search for the text it doesn't. It also doesn't show the text under the link on Google, like all the old pages on my site.