I have 3 websites that are more than 5 years old now. They rank well on major search engines incl. Google Yahoo and MSN. I now plan to shift all the pages from .html to .php Is it advisable to do so? will it harm my current rankings? and also my link campaign? Please help.
The real question is "why" are you changing your web file extension? You don't have to, a quick edit too your .htaccess file can allow you to run php directly from any *.html file without changing the extension AddType application/x-httpd-php .html Code (markup): Just add that to your .htaccess file.
If your urls consists of the extension like ../page.html instead of .../page etc. then that will hurt your ranking if you change the extension.
All the pages of my websites URLs are of type 'page.html'. These are my new pages on which I have set 301 redirect from my old pages, so its something like: oldpage.html - 301 redirected to - newpage.html And now I want to convert the newpage.html to newpage.php Will this hurt the rankings and the link structure of my websites, even using 301 redirects?
Hmm with current pages I think 301 directs pass on all of the juice and so on, but hopefully someone can clarify this for sure. If there is any doubt i'd go for feathers option on parsing php with a .html extension.
newpage.html to newpage.php will NOT hurt your rankings. But you will lose link juice for oldpage.html -> newpage.html -> newpage.php. SEs don't like it when they have to hop around so much.
As long as you redirect ALL old .html files to their equivalent .php files, you will be fine... eventually. You WILL, however, likely take a hit during the days or weeks it takes the SEs to recrawl all of your inbound links, discover the 301, and transfer credit for each link to the old URL (one-by-one as they are each recrawled) over to the new URL. I redirected 4000+ URLs on a PR7 site from .asp/.aspx file names to extensionless file names last December as part of a site redesign. 3 weeks later our rankings were better than ever. There is a section on one of my blog posts on site redesign and SEO that explains what you can expect when you implement the redirects and why.
hey feathers, what you suggested seems to be less work. but the real question is how will it affect my SEO rankings and positions? and my link campaign? also, does the .htaccess you, mentioned not, required 301 further on? I am just worried about my optimization campaign with this redirections and converting file types coming in-process