Converting files from .html to .php or editing .htaccess file
-
Good day all,
I have a bunch of files that are .html and I want to add some .php to them.
It seems my 2 options are
- Convert .html to .php and 301 redirect
or
- add this line of code to my .htaccess file and keep all files that are .html as .html
AddType application/x-httpd-php .html
My gut is that the 2nd way is better so as not alter any SEO rankings, but wanted to see if anybody had any experience with this line of code in their .htaccess file as definitely don't wan to mess up my entire site
Thanks for any help!
John
-
Hi John
The first line removes the extension
The second line adds them back in a specific order IE you want PHP to execute first.
If you got it going that is what counts.
Good luck,
Don
-
Thanks so much for this Don.. this is what I added that seemed to work for my server
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html .htm
As the AddType caused errors but doing some further research I found the above code.
I wonder if what you propose would accomplish what I did?
Thanks and all the best,
John
-
Hi John,
If the URL's are well indexed and doing well, you "may" not want to change the url. To simply add the ability to run php first you can do it very easily with just what you thought, .htaccess
In fact when I took over as webmaster on my corporate site which was indexed very well I had to do just that.
Add this to your .htaccess file:
RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html -
If you really want to go this route, add this to your site .htaccess
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]So domain.com/file will access file.html
Again, the caveat is there is a short term SEO hit for doing this. Long term, you should be fine.
-
This is a sweet idea.. any tutorial on this? How does it effect existing links directed at the .html and .php pages?
Thanks Keri!
-
Have you considered just rewriting your URLs so they don't use extensions at all? That way, when you use a different technology, you don't need to rewrite your URLs once again. If you look at SEOmoz, you see they don't use .php or .html as extensions, but instead have no extensions.
-
I did option 1 on one of my websites some time ago and works fine, rankings are the same. Takes about 2 moth to get the same visits on all the links again.
-
We use the AddType function all the time when updating websites. It's far easier to do that that to recreate everything and redirect it.
It allows all of your internal navigation to remain as is and it keeps all of your inbound links from becoming redirected links. Also, remember that it has been announced that 301 redirected links lose value over time so this is another reason to not do it the hard way.
-
Just make sure that you don't redirect all HTML files. I suspect that either way is equal. What you are telling in either case i
"Hi Google we have moved but don't worry we have moved here"
-
I would pick #2, where you process .html files with PHP. Changing URLs involves taking a temporary SEO hit and I would not recommend doing it.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can ht access file affect page load times
We have a large and old site. As we've transition from one CMS to another, there's been a need for create 301 redirects using our ht access file. I'm not a technical SEO person, but concerned that the size of our ht access file might be contributing source for long page download times. Can large ht access files cause slow page load times? Or is the coding of the 301 redirect a cause for slow page downloads? Thanks
Technical SEO | | ahw1 -
Fetch as Google - stylesheets and js files are temporarily unreachable
Fetch as Google often says that some of my stylesheets and js files are temporarily unreachable. Is that a problem for SEO? These stylesheets and scripts aren't blocked and Search Consoles show that a normal user would see the page just fine.
Technical SEO | | WebGain0 -
How Google can interpret all "hreflag" links into HTML code
I've found the solution. The problem was that did not put any closing tag into the HTML code....
Technical SEO | | Red_educativa0 -
File name same as folder name, ok?
Is it ok to have a folder and file name to be both the same e.g domain.com/xyz-products/ domain.com/xyz-products.php File name would be a page that lists a number of products and then within the folder there would be x-product.php, y-product.php etc
Technical SEO | | NeilD0 -
How do you mark a quote HTML wise?
Hi, As far as I know, in the past Italic was used to emphasize (similar use to Bold). Now I've seen people use Italic for quotations. Is that the correct thing to do for an entire paragraph or is it a problem for Google wise? Thanks
Technical SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Are building a page using HTML 5 better for seo?
Very general question really, but does anyone know whether Google sees html5 pages as being superior in any way to xhtml or html 4.x pages?
Technical SEO | | jimpannell0 -
.htaccess file in wordpress blog
I want to redirect non www to www in blog hosted by wordpress. Where can i find .htaccess file ? Shall i have to create a new one ? If yes, where should i upload it ? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
URL restructure and phasing out HTML sitemap
Hi SEOMozzies, Love the Q&A resource and already found lots of useful stuff too! I just started as an in-house SEO at a retailer and my first main challenge is to tidy up the complex URL structures and remove the ugly sub sitemap approach currently used. I already found a number of suggestions but it looks like I am dealing with a number of challenges that I need to resolve in a single release. So here is the current setup: The website is an ecommerce site (department store) with around 30k products. We are using multi select navigation (non Ajax). The main website uses a third party search engine to power the multi select navigation, that search engine has a very ugly URL structure. For example www.domain.tld/browse?location=1001/brand=100/color=575&size=1&various other params, or for multi select URL’s www.domain.tld/browse?location=1001/brand=100,104,506/color=575&size=1 &various other non used URL params. URL’s are easily up to 200 characters long and non-descriptive at all to our users. Many of these type of URL’s are indexed by search engines (we currently have 1.2 million of those URL’s indexed including session id’s and all other nasty URL params) Next to this the site is using a “sub site” that is sort of optimized for SEO, not 100% sure this is cloaking but it smells like it. It has a simplified navigation structure and better URL structure for products. Layout is similair to our main site but all complex HTMLelements like multi select, large top navigations menu's etc are all removed. Many of these links are indexed by search engines and rank higher than links from our main website. The URL structure is www.domain.tld/1/optimized-url .Currently 64.000 of these URL’s are indexed. We have links to this sub site in the footer of every page but a normal customer would never reach this site unless they come from organic search. Once a user lands on one of these pages we try to push him back to the main site as quickly as possible. My planned approach to improve this: 1.) Tidy up the URL structure in the main website (e.g. www.domain.tld/women/dresses and www.domain.tld/diesel-red-skirt-4563749. I plan to use Solution 2 as described in http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-faceted-navigation-that-doesnt-suck to block multi select URL’s from being indexed and would like to use the URL param “location” as an indicator for search engines to ignore the link. A risk here is that all my currently indexed URL (1.2 million URL’s) will be blocked immediately after I put this live. I cannot redirect those URL’s to the optimized URL’s as the old URL’s should still be accessible. 2.) Remove the links to the sub site (www.domain.tld/1/optimized-url) from the footer and redirect (301) all those URL’s to the newly created SEO friendly product URL’s. URL’s that cannot be matched since there is no similar catalog location in the main website will be redirected (301) to our homepage. I wonder if this is a correct approach and if it would be better to do this in a phased way rather than the currently planned big bang? Any feedback would be highly appreciated, also let me know if things are not clear. Thanks! Chris
Technical SEO | | eCommerceSEO0