Lost my ranks after converting to PHP and new host

[karmargin]

I own a small business website. I was ranked first in google and msn for almost all relevent searches. I've recently moved my site to another host. My site was previously and html site, however I decided to go php and used an htaccess to 301 all pages to php. Since then, google says my robots.txt is blocking pages and i've lost ALL my google ranks. I never modified my robots file. This is what my htaccess looks like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (.*).html$ /$1.php

Any idea why google would suddenly block my site?

would it have something to do with the htaccess?

[g1smd]

Why didn't you just add a handler so that file names ending in .html are still processed as containing PHP scripts.

That way, you do not need to change any of the file names or links on your site, and the problem that you have right now can never arise.

[pbaddock]

g1smd- can you point us to a resource with info on the handler approach you mention. I'm running a Joomla CMS site with an SEF URL module installed....all my url's are .html, and while my overall SEO status is good (ie good ranking), I'm nervous that I may be affected by your comment also....ie I may not be telling the search engines how to index my pages properly....can they tell that the page is not actually .html? (ie that behind the scenes - php is in action?)

[g1smd]

They simply don't need to know what happens on the server.

All they need to see is your content wrapped in HTML tags.

How that page of information was produced is completely irrelevant.

[google.com...]

[google.com...]

Both AddHandler or AddType might be involved.

[theBear]

g1smd,

I think the OP has other issues.

I see no reason that webmaster tools would tell him his robots.txt file was blocking access if it was a blind rewrite rule instead.

[edited by: tedster at 12:01 am (utc) on Dec. 2, 2006]

[jomaxx]

If it's the domain associated with the email address you registered with, look at the robots.txt file:

# Disallows folders to be indexed by all robots

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

[jomaxx]

Added... Actually there's a .net mirror of that site; presumably this robots.txt file exists in order to prevent spidering of duplicate content. I imagine the problem is with a different site.

[shogun_ro]

I think you look for this informations [google.ro].

[karmargin]

yes it is for a different site. I'm relitivly new to the whole webmaster thing. Thanks for the info

[karmargin]

this is what my robots.txt file looks like:

# Disallows folders to be indexed by all robots

User-agent: *
Disallow: /css/
Disallow: /redirect/
Disallow: /waiver/

This is what my new htaccess looks like:

RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.html$ http://www.example.ca$1.php

Google webmaster had restricted more url's since changing my htaccess. Should i simple remove it?