What will happen if I change my pages from .html to .php

I have a site full of PR4 and PR5 pages. It ranks well for lots of great keywords.

I want to make it a subscription only site. I'll have to change the url suffixes from .html to .php. Any idea how will this affect my rankings?


Thanks in advance for any replies.

 

You will lose all rankings on your inner pages. You will have to request all the url's be removed on your google dashboard or you will get errors for unreachable url's.
I had this problem before.

 

You should put a 301 redirect from your html to your php pages. You can also use the html handle for php pages.

 

D'oh! That's what I was afraid of.

 

Ok... hopefully they'll keep their rankings then?

 

they'll catch up after a while but will drop ranking at first.

 

You can use MOD REWRITE to map everything .html to .php so google will see .html (so nothing will change) but your webserver will see .php

 

If you do the 301 redirect from every .html page to every .php page (with a MOD REWRITE) you'll be fine. I've moved from .html to .jsp with no problems.

 

Removal request is a big no-no. You need just to rewrite them via .htaccess.

 

Yes, that's exactly what I suggested as well

 

convert your html pages to php: open a page with notepad and save it as xxxxxx.php and you must change a links between a pages to xxxx.php exemple href="page2.html" become href="page2.php"
do it and tell me waht happend

 

Mod-rewrite with .htaccess will keep your page rank.
This is the best method.

 

If you don't want to use url rewrite then:

You should config your apache server to see .html pages as .php, so you can put php code in html
but if you do this then all you html pages will be parsed by php. Afterwards you can use .htm if you don't want your html pages to be parsed by php

You will find this in httpd.conf:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php3

and you can add .html
AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

Good luck !

 

mod rewrite is the best option for you otherwise there is probability of loosing your ranking.

 

Yep surely you will loose your ranking, its better to do a 301 redirect

 

wow thanks klaniak!

i just tried that it's awesome.. all my .html pages can now run <?php ?> code.. pretty cool trick!

i'm doing it for all my sites from now.. but just want to double confirm if technically there isn't any downside to it? (like slowing apache, php compile time, etc).. thanks