HTML Page in PHP Website

[plinggtre67]

Does having an HTML page in a PHP website affect SEO? I have a PHP website but one of my targeted pages have an HTML page. Will it cause any harm to the website or is it fine to have a html page in a PHP website?

[donford]

Hi plinggtre67,

This should have no direct effect on SEO. The reason is, PHP is server sided script, which is usually outputted as HTML anyway. HTML is what the browser actually reads.

If you are referring to some pages having .html extensions and some having .php, then from user's perspective that may have a slight impact on some users not knowing whats going on, but in general it shouldn't matter. If you would like a consistent look on the page extensions you can use an Apache URL re-write to remove the extensions all together (just like Moz does). You should notice no pages on Moz site have an actual .extension appended to them.

Example Code: @ StackOverflow

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1.phpRewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1.html

I hope this makes sense and helps,

Don

[GlobeRunner]

Having different file types in of URLs in your site doesn't affect SEO. It may confuse  you, and you may inadvertently link internally to pages that don't exist on your site, but there is no effect on SEO.

There is a way to parse HTML files as if they were PHP pages--but nowadays I don't recommend that. If you do have HTML pages on your site, you may just want to leave them alone. But if you do think you need to change or update their functionality, then setting up a 301 Permanent Redirect from the old HTML page to a new .PHP page, for example, will do just fine. It should not have any effect on rankings.