Hi Guys,

I want to convert my website www.smartbro.com from static html to php. I mean all my website because this will give me more flexibility.

What I'm really worried about is search engines and traffic (especially Google). I was thinking of doing this like:

First, rename all my .html files into .php, then update my .htaccess file to forward all .html requests to .php

First of all, what do you think of my plan, I feel that it sucks but I can't think of another method. Do you have a better way?

My website pages have PR4, is there a chance to loose my PR b/c of this change? what do you suggest?

I appreciate any help, I really need this.

and in doing so any SE rankings/traffic etc will be seriously disrupted for 3 to 6 months.

Just set Apache to parse .html files as php, that way your URIs don't change and you can still run PHP.

Yeah, but the problem is that I'm using www.globat.com . Those guys are saying that they don't support this feature and they can't handle html files as php unless the files are renamed to php!!

I'm really stuck with this and I think I will need to find a solution for this soon.

Change the host then. Thats always one of the better option.

That's about it;

Change hosts to one that has a clue;

Stick with them and hope they get a clue soon (not very likely)

Change to .php and loose several months potential conversions.

I'm subscribed with them until Aug 2008

What potential hosts do you recommend guys?

I have once heard of a programm that converts the Html code to php within seconds.It was something like htmltophp converter or so.If you are interested I can ask friends to bring you more info about the program.

Best Regards

Thanks for the offer, but the problem is not in converting the code b/c the php parser will understand html as well, so it should work, but the problem is in getting the server to handle my files as php although their names are with .html extension.

What about using mod rewrite? Rename mypage.html to mypage.php, but call it as mypage.html from your menus and let the mod rewrite in your .htaccess redirect it to the php.

Hmmm... I think this is working great. I forwarded the .html file Awards.html to Awards.php (as a test) using:

RewriteRule ^Awards.html$ /Awards.php

It seems this is working fine ,

I tried loading the page from my website and it worked great! Also Google Toolbar shows that my Awards page has PR4. I think this is working just fine.

I only need to know if Google will be happy with this new arrangement. Do you have a way to test if Google will accept this file or not? Should I check if Google will cache the page or not?

BTW, is there a way to use the RewriteRule to forward all .html files to .php files in on shot?

something like
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)\.html $1.php [L]

should do them all (but you need to test it first) Alternatively, just list them all one by one - much longer, but easier to check!! There's loads of guides to how to do this - just google modrewrite tutorial or something similar

I use mod rewrites all the time and google has no problem with them - it just sees an html file...


PS this thread is probably more suited to the php forum

OK! Your site is static HTML pages.

Now you want to change your pages to PHP pages, in otherwords, I guess you want to script your pages using php so that it will then output html pages. If this is the case, then keep your html site up and while it is up do the php pages offline. Once you have done them the upload them like a new site, but keep the html output the same and the urls the same as your old site and you will not loose any PR or rankings as your site will just look exactly the same to your visitors as it will to the search engines. To make the pages like like html urls you will have to use mod_rewrite.

I guess everything is working now . I will need to do the forwarding for the rest of my pages. Thanks guys, I really appreciate this.