Will changing page extensions from .html to .php require a redirect?

[theideapeople]

Hi.

We are launching a new website and our .html page extensions will be replaced with a .php page extension.

Example:   www.theideapeople.com/web_design.html  (current url)

www.theideapeople.com/web_design.php  (new url)

Will this require any special treatment to maintain the page SEO ranking?  Does it make a difference if you use a .html or .php?  Thank you for your help and insight!

Jay

[Maximise]

Hi Jay,

The two will be viewed as entirely different pages. You will need to 301 redirect all .html pages to the .php version.

[sferrino]

If you are doing this to all pages on the site you can knock it out with an htaccess file like this:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [NC]

[Maximise]

Will that return a 301 header though? Shouldn't it include "R=301"?

[darrinward]

The better solution is to keep the .html extensions but tell Apache to parse them as though they were php. This is easily done in .htaccess:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm .html

I do this with pretty much all of my sites because real .html files are still served fine, and when there is php code it is executed as it would be with a .php file.

[sferrino]

Nice catch. I agree it should be:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [R=301]

[theideapeople]

Good stuff, thank you for taking the time to help!

[theideapeople]

Thank you all very much for your help and answers.  It is very much appreciated!!

[darrinward]

You're welcome, but please keep in mind that 301 redirects have an inherent loss of PageRank, even though it's quite small - no loss is better than some!

[KeriMorgret]

You might also consider writing the redirect so that you don't have any extensions (see the SEOmoz URL for an example). That way, whenever you next change technologies, your URL will still stay the same.