Reworking my Site

Should I ditch the .php3 extension?

[elklabone]

Have an established site with good PR - in dire need of a facelift.

Site was set up with .php3 extension (give you idea of how old site is).

Should I change to .php or .html extension when I re-write? Would be prettier, but will lose PR (temporarily).

Whaddya think?

--Mark

[dmmh]

if you are gonna change anything...dont use an extension at all.

why? because this will give you a problem if you want to switch again...links....search engine indexing ranking...it all starts over again

so dont use: view/index.php?id=251
use: view/?id=251

if you had done that on your current site, you wouldnt have had to come here to begin with ;)

also, read this thread about it and some other good info

[webmasterworld.com...]

[mincklerstraat]

sounds like a good idea, dmmh - in fact, if you don't mind messing with mod_rewrite, you could get this to:
/view/251/ (url preferably with the trailing slash, make non-trailing slashes redirect with 301 to the trailing slash version).

[hakre]

hi!

keep in mind, that changing anything will immediatly infect the indexing. so if your site is already indexed, why not to keep the .php3 extension but map it to php4 or 5 (if that's what you intended). this is really easy with apache and other webservers because it's only an extension of your files. how about that?

i checked the suggestions in the other thread, too and this will only affect one point (in my opinion which is a little extra only: "hide your technology" [whatever that means]).

-hakre

[dmmh]

if you 'hide' your technology, you can easily make a switch to another scripting language, if need be. Like this case (well, different extention).
He cant go ASP now, because he uses /view/index.php3?id=251
switching would mean creating new links, new indexing, etc etc

if he would have started coding his site without direct links to scripts like /view/?id=251, all he had to do was write new scripts, delete old site, upload the new pages and all his search engine indexing would remain exactly the same, since the URLs are still the same, just the tech changed ;)

besides, it just looks bad, in my opinion

[hakre]

if you 'hide' your technology, you can easily make a switch to another scripting language, if need be. Like this case (well, different extention).

false: there is no problem to map .php3 extension to asp, php 4/5, perl, js or whatever. it's only an extension that has to be configured to something else. this is a webserver configuration issue only, it's not hardencoded into the server. you can even map it as static html or plain text. please check the webservers documentation about that.

[ogletree]

Do not change URL's it has no affect on PR or rank. I always try to start with .html but if I had a site that already had .php3 I would leave it alone. There is no benefit whatsoever to changing them. There is however a very big penalty. You will lose ranking for a time and you may never get it back. Specially if some of your backlinks go to .php3 pages.

[dmmh]

false: there is no problem to map .php3 extension to asp, php 4/5, perl, js or whatever. it's only an extension that has to be configured to something else. this is a webserver configuration issue only, it's not hardencoded into the server. you can even map it as static html or plain text. please check the webservers documentation about that.

thats just sloppy...

[jatar_k]

elklabone

just leave it as is, pagenames shouldn't be changed, too much work involved and too much loss of business/traffic.

dmmh

>> sloppy

what's sloppy? mapping an extension to something else?

it's actually regular procedure and can be quite useful in many ways.

would you care to extrapolate on that comment?

[dmmh]

well like I said....using direct links to files/ pages/ scripts just looks plain wrong for starters, imo

if you start out designing the site without that, you will never have to do re-mapping etc etc.

It's less cumbersome, and you know it

[ogletree]

When I make a new site my file are always .html. I have one site that if I did not do that it would look like domain.com/page.php?var=something instead it looks like www.domain.com/something.html. Or if it is not a db site I just make the php pages like .html. I run the .html files through the php engine. This is all planning from the begining. If you did not do that just leave things the way they are if you want to switch to some other back end just have the .html sent to that engine. Sites I make would never have .html pages so there is not waste.

There is no reason to do this for the se's. I do it for when people look at it. I want my site to look like I hand made every page.

[dmmh]

yeah, I didnt mean for him to switch it all around...but somehow this thread went a little offtopic and more in the direction of general dos and donts

:)

[hakre]

okay, to calm things down: an url is an url. keep it simple. no one really cares about that extension or any extension at all.

my intention was to make a solution to the question asked here in this thread, and i would not suggest to change the extension or even to rebuild the whole page. this can be really dangerous because of side-effects with google and others. it can be like deadly biting yourself... ouch.

funny: some people talked about hiding the technology. isn't it hiding the technology to use .php3 extension for php4 files? :) don't take this one to serious please folks ;)

[ergophobe]

I've thought of chiming in a dozen times here, but so far haven't. Basically I agree with hakre though

- keep the old URLs active for sure if you are getting good traffic on them
- redirect to a new URL if you want to change your URL schema
- new URL should ideally have no extension
- extensions don't really matter as long as the server is set up accordingly
- and using a php3 extension is hiding the technology in some odd way (but I wasn't going to say it unless someone said it first).

- if it's not broke, don't fix it.