Page 2 - Using htaccess to change .php to .html

NO, no penalty; no problem whatsoever... unfortunately someone that disagrees with me will come along and say "YES", it is a problem - so you are best to:

1. go with your gut, or

2. wait for a debate of all the issues to hammer out all the nuances and then make your informed decision.

Not that I know.

Jean-Luc

Google won't penalise you for having dynamically generated content.

All I said at the beginning of this argument is that I noticed improvements in my crawl rate and the amount of pages indexed once I re-wrote my PHP ID pages to HTML.

Having said that, I have read articles saying that Google is getting better and better at crawling dynamic pages.

I still like to keep to HTML as much as possible though.

The Temporary "fetch" is "fetched" for bots that requests the referencing string and like a browser pulls all the references together to properly format a page.

Search engine treat a dyanmic string (once properly formated as a static reference).

There are some "special consideration conditions" that you need to be mindful of like too many params and long numerical strings - but that isn't any real difference that static url that resemble this:

/fdu2i0-2-02q@3i1h#7ey7%1y3$82dwqq1&903i&rj2ir3j28ur82u29r.html - which you are unlikely to use anyway.

While Yahoo and MSN don't have a neat video on this -- Google does...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6860320126300142609

NOTE: Matt will recommend a mod rewrite to create the appearance of static referrals - but it isn't necessary and certainly won't give you any SEO advantage if you don't add the keywords into your SE friendly url.

The best guidance here is:

1. if your project is brand new and never been crawled - use the mod rewrite approach "with" a keyphrase boost, or

2. if your website pages are already indexed in search engines you are best to not use any rewrite... essentially a rewrite "DELETES" all established urls - means your website is completely gone from search engines until they recrawl where the new pages references are... you'll be a 1 pager website for a little while and if you're not overly established it can take weeks, months or even a year for a complete restoration.

There's one thread here somewhere for a guy that did this and 8 months later (I think) he is still having problems... well he screwed up the mod rewrite and didn't notice for a month or so - and by then the damage was done.

That travel site that screw the rewrite: http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/heeelp-146305.html

Both will get indexed but the first one is better as far as seo goes... I know some will disagree here but I have done alot of work with mod rewrites with dynamic urls and the first one will perform better than the second.



The ext probably isn't but the "dynamic" part of it is. Query strings are not good and will not perform as well as static urls.

Wantta bet!

I say a straight simple numerical html page will rank above the same identical page as a simply numerical php page generated dynamically -- 50% of the time... the other 50% of the time the reverse will occur.

I will 100% agree that a mod rewrite will enhance the dynamic url it is so good it will also enhance the html page where the same 50/50 split will occur

or you could have the php page "as is" and mod rewrite the html page to resemble php and again the same 50/50 split will occur.

As for "alot of work with mod rewrites with dynamic urls"... how often did you do a rewrite where you did nothing else [no title changes or links etc.] and made the dynamic - static BUT left the html version "as is" e.g. edit query string 'if' ?p=1 is now p-1.html and saw an marked or fair iimprovement?

Surely your usual "lots of" rewrites are search and keyword friendly/rich to be the best they can be to rank best - or were these purely experimentation?

Most of the time when implementing mod rewrites other on-site details were already taken care of. And yes we tested a simpel query string against a simple non-keyword static url and the static url performed much better even though it had the same links pointing at it.
Dynamic query strings can be indexed by google and are all the time but they still are not treated like a simple static html url.

i agree with visio and indeed the reason i started using modrewrite was because the php pages were indexed so badly. with html on the end they perform (and look) better but still i wonder whether they would do even better if they had a file date.

I also agree with visio.

Essentially you when you rewrite you delete the previous page... how long does it take for a completely different page to "perform much better"?

By how much is a "perform much better?

I have a main page which opens as Default.php, could I use Mod-rewrite to change this to index.html?

What code would I use to do this? Some directories will not list my site with the php extension.

Thanks

Roger