Thread: Switching to PHP

Okay, so I made a site in HTML and uploaded it to the internet a couple of weeks ago. But I just decided to change it to php because I wanted to use some PHP includes.. just as I switch to php I find that my site is now on google when I search certain things but its linking to the old HTML pages..

How long is it going to take google to switch its listings to my pages from HTML to PHP?

Thanks.

Originally Posted by SHFarms

Okay, so I made a site in HTML and uploaded it to the internet a couple of weeks ago. But I just decided to change it to php because I wanted to use some PHP includes.. just as I switch to php I find that my site is now on google when I search certain things but its linking to the old HTML pages..

How long is it going to take google to switch its listings to my pages from HTML to PHP?

Thanks.

It can take a while. The best thing you can do is redirect the old pages to the new pages. Log in to cPanel and find domains then click redirects. Follow the instructions on that page and try to redirect one of the .html pages to the .php page. I recently had to do this for my site as well. When you redirect a old page to new page you won't miss out on visits and it passes on the pagerank from the old page to the new page. So you won't loose any search engine rankings if you do this.

I had to do this awhile back for the same reason, and found that it is much easier to start creating folders instead of just index.html or index.php. This way if you ever have to change your pages again in the future, you won't have to go through all the re-directs again.

For example, let's say you have a website on shoes, and one of your inner pages focuses on a certain type of shoe like Dansko (love these btw). Your structure could look something like this: www.yoursite.com/shoes/dansko/ This way your index file could be index.html, index.php, index.asp or whatever and it will show up every time just using the folder name.

This also helps with SEO to have keywords in your folder names.