Changing from html to php - affect search rankings?

[nickreynolds]

Being a simple soul I design my sites in html.
I have a customer who has "bought" a mobile version of his site, Effectively this is a .mobi domain name and code to convert hispages. He's sent it through to me to implement for him.

Here's the nub - it requires all his pages to be in php and so I need to convert all his pages from html to php.

Here's the question - will changing index.html to index.php, prices.html to prices.php affect his search rankings?

[MrBlack]

As long as you have been redirecting index.html to / you will be ok. I did the same thing with one of my sites and saw no change in rankings

[TheMadScientist]

Technically, .php is a different page than .html and you'll lose some link weight through the redirects, so imo it would be better to rewrite the php to the html extensions, or parse the html as php. You can find out more about how in the Apache Forum [webmasterworld.com]. It's actually fairly simple to parse the html as php if it's going to be every page.

[robzilla]

Here's a similar topic that might be helpful: [webmasterworld.com...]

[bhartzer]

will changing index.html to index.php, prices.html to prices.php affect his search rankings?

Yes, it will have an effect on rankings. I definitely would parse the html as PHP, just like TheMadScientist is recommending.

If you change URLs then you'll lose some rankings.

[g1smd]

There is no need to change the URLs when you add PHP functionality to a site.

There are two ways to do this.

Either force .html files to be parsed for PHP content, or change the files from .html to .php and implement an internal rewrite so that when a .html URL is requested the server looks for the matching .php file to carry out the request.

To be clear, URLs and files are not at all the same thing, and the action of a server is to map a URL request to an internal file.

[Robert Charlton]

I have a customer who has "bought" a mobile version of his site, Effectively this is a .mobi domain name and code to convert hispages. He's sent it through to me to implement for him.

Before you implement .mobi as the mobile version, you might want to check this current thread...

Best type of redirect to use, from desktop to mobile site?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4291642.htm [webmasterworld.com]

In particular, check out Google's recommendations....

They are specifically recommending a 301 redirect from www.domain.com to m.domain.com.

So it may be that .mobi is not the way you want to go, and for various reasons you may end up not using the script that requires php.

[nickreynolds]

Belatedly - many thanks for the replies - very helpful