Reworking my site, should I dump .php3 extension?

Have an established site with good PR - in dire need of a facelift.

Site was set up with .php3 extension (give you idea of how old site is).

Should I change to .php or .html extension when I re-write? Would be prettier, but will lose PR (temporarily).

Whaddya think? Worthwhile, or am I being too anal?

--Mark

 

You could always go without the extensions in case you change technology again.

Example: link-without-extension

 

Well, we're still using php...

But the php3 extension is just a little, I dunno.. clunky.

Newer sites I force .htm or .html to parse with PHP, but gives a little security boost (maybe).

I just hate to change the extension, but I'd kind of like to anway.

--Mark

 

The extension is something the server understands. On my own site, I use the .tngx extension, which of course, is not a "real" extension. It's still just PHP.

Because you already have PR and traffic coming to the old pages, I'd keep them with the old extension and give any new pages the new extension.

But if you really want to go with .php or whatever, you can always write an auto_prepend script that rewrites the URI to the new one.

 

My response yesterday was a little hurried and to my chagrin, I spoke before I did any research.

herbal-nutrition.net PR 5
herbal-nutrition.net/index.php PR 4
herbal-nutrition.net/contact.php3 PR 0
herbal-nutrition.net/contact.php PR 4

My gut feeling is that if you just change the sequence of the directoryindex directive in your httpd.conf file (assuming you're running apache) to have index.php before index.php3, your new alpha site will be showing by default and with no PR penalty.

I'd love to hear anybody's thoughts on this..

 

What if you stay with the PHP3 extension and use mod_rewrite to write to HTML or whatever you want? will it affect the PR?

 

Google would still see the new extension wouldn't they - and my PR would drop off temporarily, which really isn't a big deal unless it effects our SERPS. That's kind of why I added the "alpha" link at the bottom, building new pages with .php extension, kind of hiding it from visitors but letting Google find it and bring the PR up, then I was gonna put a 301 (that's the right code for moved permanently, right?) on the old .php3 pages.

Again, it's purely cosmetic...

 

dump it and use .php.. like you posted before, the php3 had a PR0, so why keep it