html to php ; Google rankings

[junglesnail]

Hey,

I have this domain 5 years old and it had a hard to use design for the visitors. I decided to redesign it.
The site presents some event planning services, which is kind of a family bussiness. ( but no importance :) )
I changed the website design and also changed it from .html to .php files , also added some new pages. I used a .htaccess redirect from the old pages to the new ones. ( for example sound-services.html became services.php?name=sound ). The content is pretty much the same, and google indexed just fine de new pages.
BUT

The site was in top 5 search results on a lot of keywords and week by week the website was falling in position. Now i found myself on 50+ results return even at 300+.

What do you think could have gone wrong ?

aah.. P.S. : I changed the webhosting also.

Thanks for reading.

[bill]

Why did you bother doing that? You could have simply set the server to parse HTML as PHP and avoided the renaming.

[phranque]

have you looked at your inbound links and checked your log for 404's?

[netchicken1]

Similar happened to me, so I put the html pages back with all links on them pointing to php pages, content was different enough for me to have both.

[edited by: netchicken1 at 7:31 am (utc) on April 23, 2009]

[junglesnail]

yes everything seems to be But doesn't matter anyway. I also needed some php generated pages to be less easier for me to change content.

[phranque]

what response code does your server provide when it gets a request for one of the old urls?
404 Not Found?
301 Moved Permanently?
200 OK?
?