Page Rank of Moved Pages

[David]

Shortly I'm going to be renaming all of the files on the CADTutor website. Currently, all the files have a ".html" file suffix and all the new ones will have a ".php" suffix. I addition, and to aid SEO, all directories/folders will also be renamed in order to be more explicit. When the site was designed, getting on for 4 years ago now, the logic of file and directory naming was to be as brief as possible and so many of my folder names are abbreviated.

Now all of this is a positive move but the BIG question is: "what will happen to my Google page rank when the files are renamed and the site is rearranged?"

I currently have a respectable 5/10 page rank and naturally, I don't want to lose that.

I partly answered my own question recently when I moved the CADTutor Forum. Until last October the forum was at cadtutorforum.net, a domain name I was never really happy with but it had a page rank of 4/10. Now the forum is at cadtutor.net/forum and when I first moved it, the page rank dropped to 0/10 but today I noticed that the pagerank has gone up to 5/10 - even better than before.

So it looks as though I'll be OK changing everything providing I wait 2-3 months for my page rankings to be recalculated - well, that's what I'm hoping anyway.

[francis]

On Apache? This might be just what you're looking for (http://www.computerbb.org/about495.html). It uses the HTTP 301 (permanently moved) status code (http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/apache/http-status-codes-explained/) and it can be added via an .htaccess file. Not sure how IIS works, but this might help (http://www.bruceclay.com/SEO-tech-tips/).

[Tom]

I suggest leaving the old pages on the server for the forseeable future. Also I would have both index.htm and index.html pages. Then I don't think your page rank will be too much affected.

[francis]

You'll need to have a redirect on for the .html and .htm pages though, as servers tend to favour those extensions before others, such as .php. Without a redirect, your htm/l page will be served and your php one will be ignored. AFAIK, you can't change that via .htaccess, it has to be done via the httpd.conf file which you won't have access to. You probably know this, but in the httpd file, look for:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var

and add index.php in there. The nearer the front of the list, the sooner Apache will use it.

The idea of the redirect is that Google will pick up on the fact that the old document is no longer and update its listings. With a redirect in place, the old files will never get served as the server will bounce everything (bots and normal users) to the resource.

[David]

Thanks Francis. 301 sounds like a good number. Sadly I don't have full access to .htaccess (at Fasthosts :( ) but there may be a workaround - I'll investigate.

Tom, leaving all the existing .html files there is not an option for the reasons given and it goes agains my general principle of keeping everything neat and tidy ;)

I am assured by what happened with the forum that whatever I do, my rankings will be back to normal a few months after any change. Do you think it's reasonable to extrapolate to the rest of the site from this one example?

[Tom]

The bloke who was interviewed by 'the well known search engine company' at the same time as me said that traffic on his Travel site took a sharp dip when he switched to PHP - and so he has been running a parallel static site ever since. I agree that it takes 'a few months' for Google rankings to settle down - and I will be very interested to hear whether and how soon it reaches its previous level. Good on you for running the experiment!

[James]

Tom, a PHP site can be just as static as a HTML site.

Put simply, a PHP page is seen as HTML by browsers and search engines.

My home page at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/index.php is pure HTML, it has no actual server-processed PHP in it at all, in fact I could change it to index.html without loss of function - are you SURE this will help my ranking?

However, dynamic pages in PHP are different.

This is hard to explain, but if the site's pages are constructed on the fly from a database using PHP then there may be search engine problems.

If a site is in PHP simply because it uses includes and other PHP functions then this should not make any difference whatsoever to the search engine.

I think.

[francis]

No it shouldn't. What the person you met at Google, er, the search engine company didn't say was how he managed his change from html to php. If he did nothing but take down the html files and replace them with php ones, of course he will suffer. The bots will go back to try and find his page and they're not there any more. No HTTP trickery would mean that the bots had no information as to why the page wasn't there any more and they wouldn't know to discard their old information and index the new page.

[Tom]

Sorry, yes: I meant dynamic PHP pages. I did not have time to question the man but I left with the belief that he is using a PHP programme to generate static versions of his dynamic pages and publishing them as .htm supplements. As mentioned before, I was going to switch to PHP a few months ago but started using Webmerge instead. I love it: two clicks and it re-generates 1,500 static pages from a database. Lots of Webmerge users do this once a day. Quite apart from any benefits to ranking, it must yield a faster response time than dynamic pages.

[David]

But presumably you have to upload all of those pages each time you update. Or does Webmerge work on the server?

[Tom]

Yes, they have to be uploaded each time. I do this about once/month but Webmerge users with e-commerce sites seem do it once/day. With a broadband connection it's not an issue. You can daisy-chain the merge operations so that one click runs merges on as many templates as you like.

[David]

Hmm, I've looked at the Webmerge site and some reviews and I understand what it does and how it does it but I cannot see the advantage of it over a PHP based CMS - indeed, the manual process of adding content to the database, exporting to txt and then linking to tags in a template seems onerous. I guess if you have a site where the structure is static and where only the content is updated it might work but :blink: I don't really get it.

Tom, I guess that you've found a particular solution that works for you but I don't see that it can have a wide appeal - or am I just missing something?

[Tom]

I agree about the disadvantages.

The advantages are (1) less stress on my brain (2) the searchability advantage of static pages (3) faster response from the server.

Re server response time, Cadtutor was rated 'slow' by Alexa a few months ago but is now rated 'fast'. It will be interesting to see if this is affected when you switch to a dynamic site.

[David]

Originally posted by Tom Turner@Jan 6 2005, 12:13 pm
Re server response time, Cadtutor was rated 'slow' by Alexa a few months ago but is now rated 'fast'. It will be interesting to see if this is affected when you switch to a dynamic site.
Yes, I upgraded the hosting from single server to "load balanced" and from Windows to Unix and it now runs much faster than it did :D