What's the most Google friend way to change from an index html page to a php as I am converting (only the front page!) to wordpress. I know I have to change the .htaccess file but should I also add a 301 redirect? At the moment when someone clicks on the result from google he gets taken to the domain.com page, not domain.com/index.html. So would Google see this as a different page or not, since there aren't any links leading directly to domain.com/index.html, only domain.com? What do you think?
if you set up a permenant redirect from index.php and index.html to domain.com google will eventually recognise domain.com as the default page and will drop the others from the index replacing it with domain.com it;s also worth setting a perm redirect to send people to either www.domain.com or domain.com, Google sees these as two seperate domains. it's best if they are given instructions regarding which one to use and which one to index. basically, use a permenant redirect to send people, and bots, to whichever URL you want them to use and index.
I've done it before from html to php. I just changed the page extension to php and everything was fine.
if you are on *nix server, mod rewrite in .htaccess: RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^index.html index.php and live happy with your .php page.
If you do simple redirect, you will be punished for dup content. 301 is the only viable solution. Still, it will take some time for the old pages to be removed from the index. One of my sites lost its PR (4 to 0) after I did php -> html with proper redirects, so be careful.
The index.html will lose its PR if you change it to .php because its effectively a different page name. However the root domain.com will still have its PR.
So let me get this straight.. I added this index.php page without deleting the index.html and over night, something strange happened as when I went to the root domain i.e. domain.com I could see the index.php page from wordpress. Not sure how this worked out. So as I said, domain.com/index.html doesn't have a PR and I haven't used it to link to anywhere. In this case, would I still have to redirect anything? This is what I wrote in my .htaccess file: redirect 301 /index.html http://www.***.com/index.php But I don't know if it's of much use as only the page on the root domain was actually modified. Also, what's the different between a normal 301 and an L 301 Redirection?