Hi, I have a drink recipe website that is presently a php site (all the recipes each have a static php page). I am presently paying someone to change it to a database based site so I can add recipes easily. Will this affect my page rank and indexed pages? I am thinking it will. (my site presently has a pr of 0 but the future pr prediction is pr4). Any ideas? Thanks
The only thing affecting pagerank is the web address for your site. If your url's change then those url's won't show any pageranking until the next toolbar.
The search engines do not know whether your pages are dynamic or not, but using a .php extension gives them a hint that it may be. So you may already be hurt by your .php extension, and making the pages dynamically read from a database will give you more flexibility and make it easier to manage the content. Then the trick would be to use mod_rewrite to give your dynamic php/database pages a more search engine friendly .html extension/url
Make sure that each page has different titles and meta tags and use mod rewrite as suggested above. Also 301 redirect any old pages to the new pages and you will be fine.
However when they index your website, I think your Page Rank may go down if you have more outbound links, poor content and such.
Pagerank is heavly dependant on other sites linking to your site not so much as internal page indexing. So, not it really will not hurt unless those sites that are linking to your site changes there link to your site. For example sitewide link to site1 with index 289 links to your site then they change there content format and you get only 20 links to your site from there site will hurt your site. Now, changing from static to dynamic might hurt your SE index ranking, because the content has changed, but on the same note it can help your SE index ranking, because being dynamic the content will seem to be newer and SE love that. As was said look into mod_rewrite & 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages.
However, if people are linking to: index.html and you create index.php Then yes it will matter. But if the point to http://www.example.com then it won't
Dude, google doesn't care what your page extension is! All that matters is that you don't have more than 2 variables in the url so the page can get indexed (as per Google). Html, htm, php, asp... whatever it doesn't matter from a pagerank or seo point of view. You think if a search engine finds a page mydomain.com/content.php it's gonna rank that page lower than if it were mydomain.com/content.html? No it won't. Mod_rewrite is only helpful if you want to make url friendly pages from stuff like mydomain.com/cgi/pages/index.php?go=subcat&id=15 to mydomain.com/content.html Look at the digital point threads in Google! I bet if you do a search for something posted here about one of your sites it probably outranks your own website! Not only are they php pages but they have a variable! The extension doesn't matter, and quite frankly the url doesn't matter much either.
Great tips guys!! I was afraid I was making a mistake by having the site changed from php to database driven... What a relief!! Thanks
Well, the changes to my site have been made. It is now dartabase driven. The problem is that the php pages that are indexed right now are showing up as 404 errors in my sites logs. I have contacted the programmer and hopefully he can/will help me!!