7 replies to this topic

[star1]

Hello,

I have just has a news feed added to my site so the homepage had to be made dynamic for the news to update automatically

before my webiste was www.domain.com/ or www.domain.com/index.html

my developer has changed the homepage to www.domain.com/index.php and has done a mod rewrite??? (not sure what this is but it makes any index.html become index.php

My homepage now has no page rank and my old homepage had a PR of 4. Is this change likely to affect my google SERPS in a negative way?

many thanks in advance

Star

[Randy]

A question.

With the change if you attempt to go to www.yoursite.com/index.html does the URL address now change in your browser to be index.php? How about if you simply go to www.yoursite.com/ ? Does it keep the base address or does it change?

If it changes you'll want to figure out what status code the server is delivering. There are several tools out there that'll help you check the headers being sent. You'll want it to be a 301 Moved Permanently response.

If the address bar doesn't change then there's not a visible redirect in the mix anywhere.

[Jill]

I believe you can set your config file on your server so that index.php is the "default" page so that people can still get to your site via www.example.com and not need to use either index.html or index.php. I'd look into doing that if I were you.

I believe you can also set index.html to 301 redirect to index.php which will pass an link pop and PageRank (eventually) if people were linking to you via www.example.com/index.html instead of just www.example.com.

Randy knows a lot more about those config files on the server than I do, so he can take it from here if this sounds like it fits your situation!

[star1]

I believe you can set your config file on your server so that index.php is the "default" page so that people can still get to your site via www.example.com and not need to use either index.html or index.php. I'd look into doing that if I were you.

I believe you can also set index.html to 301 redirect to index.php which will pass an link pop and PageRank (eventually) if people were linking to you via www.example.com/index.html instead of just www.example.com.

Randy knows a lot more about those config files on the server than I do, so he can take it from here if this sounds like it fits your situation!

Thanks for your help, my developer has nopw changed the dynamic page to that the page is now displayed as index.html but is still dynamic ? and has its page rank. I think some php code has been inserted into the html page as only a small section of the page needs to be dynamic.

so all is back to normal now i hope

[Randy]

Yup, should be fine. The developer enabled php parsing for html files. It's a nice, clean solution.

[Big E]

Just so anyone else knows, there's a declaration that goes in your 'httpd.conf':

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php index.cgi index.htm

that will dictate what Apache looks for as the default page. In this case, it will first look for index.html, and if that doesn't exist, it will look for index.php and so on. But the best solution is what the poster had done (parsing html for php).

Incidently, if you had a high volume website and you didn't want to parse ALL html files for PHP - you just wanted to parse that particular index.html file, you could do (in httpd.conf or .htaccess):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/index.html - [T=application/x-httpd-php]

And that would force that one particular file to be parsed for PHP and no others.

[star1]

Thanks big E I think my devloper has parsed all html pages for php what would be the disadvantage of this for me? would it have any effect on my seo?

[Randy]

Thanks big E I think my devloper has parsed all html pages for php what would be the disadvantage of this for me? would it have any effect on my seo?

No effect whatsoever on SEO. They cannot see, nor do they care if the server is parsing html as php.

No real disadvantage anywhere else either. First you're not talking about a huge difference in server load. Second, if there is no php in your .html pages the server won't be doing anything substantially different than it would for straight .html files.

In other words, no worries at all.