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
-
Moving site from html to Wordpress site: Should I port all old pages and redirect?
Any help would be appreciated. I am porting an old legacy .html site, which has about 500,000 visitors/month and over 10,000 pages to a new custom Wordpress site with a responsive design (long overdue, of course) that has been written and only needs a few finishing touches, and which includes many database features to generate new pages that did not previously exist. My questions are: Should I bother to port over older pages that are "thin" and have no incoming links, such that reworking them would take time away from the need to port quickly? I will be restructuring the legacy URLs to be lean and clean, so 301 redirects will be necessary. I know that there will be link juice loss, but how long does it usually take for the redirects to "take hold?" I will be moving to https at the same time to avoid yet another porting issue. Many thanks for any advice and opinions as I embark on this massive data entry project.
Technical SEO | | gheh20130 -
Both links with ".html" and without are working , Is that a problem ?
Default format of my url ending with ".html" , I know it's not a problem .. But both links with ".html" and without are working , Is that critical problem or not ? and how to solve it ?
Technical SEO | | Mohamed_Samer0 -
Htaccess mod rewrite from server address
Hi there, I'm not massively experienced with creating mod rewrite rules and I'm worried I've got this wrong as its slightly different to what I'm used to. The web dev and content creators were working on http://5.10.105.45/~isea/ to create content. I want to redirect all URL's to www.iseasurfwear.co.uk. This is what I've written //Rewrite to www
Technical SEO | | BlueTree_Sean
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^5.10.105.45/~isea/[nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.iseasurfwear.co.uk/$1 [r=301,nc] Can anyone tell me if this is correct?0 -
Have I constructed my robots.txt file correctly for sitemap autodiscovery?
Hi, Here is my sitemap: User-agent: * Sitemap: http://www.bedsite.co.uk/sitemaps/sitemap.xml Directories Disallow: /sendfriend/
Technical SEO | | Bedsite
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /media/catalog/product/cache/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /categories/
Disallow: /blog/index.php/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/result/index/
Disallow: /links.html I'm using Magento and want to make sure I have constructed my robots.txt file correctly with the sitemap autodiscovery? thanks,0 -
Can you have a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html on the same site?
Thanks in advance for any responses; we really appreciate the expertise of the SEOmoz community! My question: Since the file extensions are different, can a site have both a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html both siting at the root domain? For example, we've already put the html sitemap in place here: https://www.pioneermilitaryloans.com/sitemap Now, we're considering adding an XML sitemap. I know standard practice is to load it at the root (www.example.com/sitemap.xml), but am wondering if this will cause conflicts. I've been unable to find this topic addressed anywhere, or any real-life examples of sites currently doing this. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | PioneerServices0 -
Do index.php extensions count as duplicate content on Joomla sites?
When i run my error report, i see 2 duplicate pages, but both are the main domain and then the /index.php extension. how do i fix this? does it really count as duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | valetseo0 -
Benefits to having an HTML sitemap?
We are currently migrating our site to a new CMS and in part of this migration I'm getting push-back from my development team regarding the HTML sitemap. We have a very large news site with 10s of thousands of pages. We currently have an HTML sitemap that greatly helps with distributing PR to article pages, but is not geared towards the user. The dev team doesn't see the benefit to recreating the HTML sitemap despite my assurance that we don't want to lose all these internal links since removing 1000s of links could have a negative impact on our Domain Authority. Should I give in and concede the HTML sitemap since we have an XML one? Or am I right that we don't want to get rid of it?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Non-www to www code not working in htaccess
I use the same rewrite code on every site to consolidate the non-www and www versions. All sites in Joomla, linux hosting. Code is as follows: RewriteEngine On rewritecond %{http_host} ^site.com/ rewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L] Immediately following this code, I also rewrite /index.php to /. Thing is, I can get index.php to rewrite correctly but the non-www won't rewrite to www. I use the same code on every site but for some reason it's not working here. Are there common issues that interfere with rewriting a non-www to www in htaccess that could be interfering with the code I'm using above?
Technical SEO | | Caleone0