I have a website that is focused around classified advertisement. Right now adding new ads to my site is manually done. I’m having some programmers implementing a php based system that would automate the process of adding new ads, so my advertisers can do it themselves. Here is my question, Right now I have good rankings for my advertising pages and I wanted to find out if and how I can keep those rankings after I implement this system? Is there anything I should be aware of that would affect my rankings, when implementing this type of system? I was concerned that if the URLs change from .html to .php that might have a negative effect? Thanks for your help!
This is the best solution. However you probably need to have your own dedicated server for this to be possible. No host is going to let you do this on a shared server. I recently did something similar and configured the server to process SSI directives in files with html extensions. Worked great and no lost traffic.
They are probably using php to take advantage of include files etc. If the php pages are php files without the ? variables then its not so bad. If the programmers are good enough they will be able to either implement mod rewrite via the .htaccess file (loads of info here on the forums about that) or have some scripts generate the html pages on the fly. Using mod rewrite, they can still use a template php file. The html generation is harder but better.
Most if not all host will allow you to place a directive in the .htaccess to parse HTML in the PHP engine. Here is the code: AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .htm .html Code (markup):
this is what I put in my htaccess file..... I got this code from this forum somewhere early last year. ========================== Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine ON RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Z]+)\.html$ /property.php?propertyid=$1 [L] =========================== The above code produces a html page which looks something like this.... mydomain.com/HWEM890.html (if the property reference in the database is HWEM890 it produces HWEM890.html and so on and so forth) Please note I am in no way a php programmer, php still eludes me in some ways, I mainly do asp which I am quite good at, but I learnt this in about 2 hours and created a 35,000 page site out of it, so your guys if they are php party people, should have no problem implemeting this. Basically I have a MySQL database with some 35,000 properties records in it and have a single page in the root of the site called property.php. (the other page I have is index.php) On the index.php, I created a random function that displays 20 random properties everytime you refresh the page (I thought, "if google wants updated content when it hits my site then so be it"). Then on each modded page, I display a random 20 links linking to each of the modded pages which in turn link to each other so that when the google spider hitsthe site it ends up spidering everysingle page on the site. It seemed to have worked becasue Google has sucked the pages up like a charm and they all appear static. This way when I want to change something n the site, I only have to edit the proeprty.php page. I hope that makes sense to you. BTW, usually web hosts have the mod rewrite installed as standard but its nothing for them to turn it on, takes them two seconds.
Interesting question, because I've been grappling with this decision myself. I want to switch one of my site with 1000s of files over to php, but the idea of losing search engine ranking is preventing me.
If you already have the files, and just want to be able to run PHP in the pages, I suggest the code as listed. You have to make NO changes, just allows you to have PHP in your HTML files: AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .htm .html