Hello, I have an existing site that is a basic php/html static site and I wish to update to the Joomla CMS platform. Currently my site has the content on certain urls, when I change to the new platform I will maintain the urls and existing content, however joomla has the ability to also have additional elements and more data on the same urls. I realize that I must be careful with the current content and current urls; my question is will changing my current indexed php/html static site pages to a Joomla CMS site have any adverse affects to the way the search engines view or index my site? Thanks
No it will not. I have done this over a year ago with my photo site. I made sure than I completely transfered the url structure using search engine friendly urls with html file extension. Due to a different gallery structure I couldn't do this with all pages so I had to 301 some of them (not a big deal). I have not seen any adverse effects. If anything the ranking has improved.
Thanks for the compliment. If you can, design the site on your local machine first (using xampp for apache/php/perl ...) http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html And upload it when you are finished. This way you minimize downtime (Google frowns upon downtime)
Yes, if the site structure is the same nothing should change... What could effect your rankings is if in the transfer you lose content, meta tags, title tags, alt tags, etc. Make sure that you try to keep the code as similar to the old site (or better) as possible to ensure your rankings follow you.