Adsense and ASP-to-PHP Migration

[CommandDork]

I'm completing work for a client that involves a migration from Classic ASP to PHP with Adsense involved as the primary revenue-maker. This is a straight-up ASP to PHP conversion so the domain and all pages will be EXACTLY the same save for the .asp page extensions becoming .php in the new arrangement.

My question/concern is: Will this sort of migration effect anything Adsense is doing on the site? Should we expect an RPM/revenue drop as auction placements possibly reset and the site has to rebuild within the Adsense system?

My gut tells me NO, that everything should be fine if left as-is, but I just wanted to be sure what to expect before I pull the trigger.

[NickMNS]

ASP and PHP are both server side scripting languages, assuming that the conversion will in fact be one for one, then Adsense/Google should see no difference as they receive the pages as rendered by the server. Now the question really becomes how well does the assumption really hold?

The first element that doesn't hold is .asp to .php switch. Any page that switches will likely be considered a completely new page to AdSense and may need to be recrawled before ads are served. This shouldn't be a big deal but may cause a slight drop in revenue when the change occurs, but I doubt that it would last.

Page load speed may also change, hopefully getting a faster in which case it would be positive more than negative.

Finally when it comes to Google one really can't know for sure, AdSense and search performance can change drastically even when you do nothing.

Good luck, migrations are stressful times.

[CommandDork]

Thanks Nick, I thought as much but what you said gives me peace. Just control what's controllable - and, at the end of the day, sacrifice a virgin to the Google Gods.

Thanks again. Much appreciated.

[NickMNS]

and, at the end of the day, sacrifice a virgin to the Google Gods.

I would have thought that a chicken or a goat would've been enough.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

As said above, changing the extension of the pages, is the same as changing the URL. So each .php page will be seen a as a new page of the site, at least for a while. Do not forget to set up 301 redirects. As a result, from an Adsense point of view, each single page, will have to be visited by a human, to trigger a visit by the Adsense bot, and then only after this, ads will start to show. So the impact can be small, if the site is made of few pages, frequently visited (by humans), but if you have a large site, with lot of pages, each, not being visited frequently, it can take a while, before ads starts showing again.

Too late, but, it's better to stick with the .html extension for pages, regardless of the how the pages are generated, so you can switch language, without touching the URLs of your pages.