My question for you is why are you switching from PHP pages to HTML pages when you still want the functionality of PHP pages?

If you are planning on just changing the extension of your scripts from php to html, my advice, leave it as php. There is no seo advantage to renaming your pages from .php to .html. File extensions (with the exception of maybe .exe) are irrelevant to search engines. It is the content they care about.

However if you are wishing to have keywords added to the html pages, and hence have one html page per piece of content (ie - 1 php script -> 140 html pages), then I can see some value in that. It is not as important as you may think it is, and Matt Cutts would probably tell you to leave your site as PHP, but if you want to do it, the best thing to use is 301 redirects from the old format to the new format.

A 301 tells the search engines that the old page has moved to a new page, and to now use the new page in place of the old one.

In theory, this protects your rankings, etc.

Thanks Maximillianos, I don't actually want to keep the php web builder generated pages - only for their current 'status' in Yahoo, MSN and also Google Page Rank.. I have had problems with the web builder and would like to try out with html built... would I have to 301 all individual pages?

That may be the easiest solution. Since you only have 140 pages, you could easily build a manual list of 301 redirects to the new html versions.

Then any new content moving forward would be html already and not need the redirect.

This seems a task for a "mod_rewrite" function in your .htaccess file. With a couple lines of code in your .htaccess file you can redirect all *.php files to *.html.

S.

[edited by: phranque at 6:22 pm (utc) on Dec. 16, 2008]
[edit reason] No urls, please. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

Thanks 'Guys'!

Further to my post above, for instructions how to edit your .htaccess file so all your .php pages automatically redirect to their new .html pages, google ".htaccess" ...

.S.

[edited by: Siteman at 11:30 pm (utc) on Dec. 16, 2008]

It sounds like the page code will change even if you want the same pages and are keeping the same URI's. Switching from XHTML (.php) to HTML means that even the header information will be different.

Even if you get the pages to look identical to the old versions, which might not be an easy task, and if you get the 301 redirects down perfectly they may still appear different to the search engines.

If you see a page fall out of the search engines give it a few days to see if it returns on its own. I've made updates on pages that were ranked #1 before and had them vanish for a few days before returning to #1. I think it's a Google safety thing, it seems automatic.

That may be the easiest solution. Since you only have 140 pages, you could easily build a manual list of 301 redirects to the new html versions.

Then any new content moving forward would be html already and not need the redirect.

My advice is not to redirect the .php to .html

Keep the .php suffix on your flat pages so in future if and when you decide you do need some server side scripting, you don't have to change back. Just becuase the file type is php doesn't mean that there has to be any php in the page code. Also whether the page is HTML 4 or XHTML is irrelevant.

All the best.

Keep the same URLs and Google et. al with have no idea that the back-end functionality that generates those pages has changed.

Keep the exact same URLs. Exact Same. No redirects required.