Maintaining and salvaging PR5 website

[woopwoop]

Can anyone with experience / knowledge of this help.

I bought a PR5 website (with only 275 indexed pages in google, 1200 in msn)
All of these pages are .html files.
The site is ugly, old and has outdated content and design.

I'm trying to build a new site around the old files without risking the pagerank.

I'm thinking of putting adsense in a new header, along with a message that this is the old website, "click 'here' to go to the new homepage" so that this will appear on all old pages. Maybe on the new homepage I'll have an archive tab in the nav column - under which I can have all the main links from the old homepage (to try and have the PR of the homepage unaffected).


My question is how do I do all this?
How careful do I have to be?

Is there a safe way to change all these files to .php files (and include php header code)? What's the safest way to set up redirects so that the indexed pages don't get lost for ever, but simply get updated with the new php files?


This is a 10 year old PR5 website and so I'm trying not to ruin what this site has naturally gained - but the thing is so dated it needs to be radically changed - I'm thinking of adding a forum, basing the homepage and site on wordpress, maybe offering people webmail based on the domain.

^can these changes kill the natural PR such a site has gained over the years?
For example should I stay away from wordpress?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Admin]

I use my .htacess for redirects, you could do specific redirects so that pagename.html gets redirected to pagename.php

I am not sure of the SEO aspects of that but at least the visitor will get the (new) page they expected.

Alternatively, you could do a simple redirect of any unfound pages to the site homepage, I use that a lot.

Admin

 

[etro]

If you have access to the http.conf file you could actually alter the mime types to allow apache to parse .html as php files.

Haven't done this in a long time but you would have al line something like this already in the config:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .php3 .php4 .php5
which basically says for php, recognise these file extensions.

adding .whatever to the line would allow you to call index.whatever and it would get parsed as a php file (index.php).

eg.
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .php3 .php4 .php5 .whatever

Note: this is a pretty bad idea if you have alot of static/cache .html files elsewhere on the server as every .html file would no longer be a static file but be parsed by php on load increasing cpu load a little.

 

[woopwoop]

I use my .htacess for redirects, you could do specific redirects so that pagename.html gets redirected to pagename.php

I am not sure of the SEO aspects of that but at least the visitor will get the (new) page they expected.

Alternatively, you could do a simple redirect of any unfound pages to the site homepage, I use that a lot.

Admin

Thx admin that was what I was thinking - I'm wondering how seo is affected by this. Does anybody know? Over time will google just change the indexed pages it has of my site to the php (because of the redirects i set up)?

Can this hurt seo or PR?

If you have access to the http.conf file you could actually alter the mime types to allow apache to parse .html as php files.

Haven't done this in a long time but you would have al line something like this already in the config:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .php3 .php4 .php5
which basically says for php, recognise these file extensions.

adding .whatever to the line would allow you to call index.whatever and it would get parsed as a php file (index.php).

eg.
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .php3 .php4 .php5 .whatever

Note: this is a pretty bad idea if you have alot of static/cache .html files elsewhere on the server as every .html file would no longer be a static file but be parsed by php on load increasing cpu load a little.

I kinda understand this - would be worried if I needed an html file to be an html file occasionally and the effects on the indexed pages that google has. Simlar qu. to those above... do you think googles index will show the new file types soon and without affecting PR/seo?

Thanks

 

[ratboy]

The best way and the one Google likes is using .htaccess as Admin states - I know I keep banging on about it but this book is ace and covers all that in detail - especially how to do exactly what you plan, i.e. updating an existing site the correct way:

Amazon.co.uk: Get to the Top on Google: Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of Google and Stay There: David Viney: Books

 

[toronto-seo]

Whatever you want to do do it gradually, do not change the whole site strucutre/content overnight, make sure when you remove an old page to 301 redirect the old URL to the home page or any other page that has similar content.

 

[woopwoop]

Thanks guys, so far I've kept the PR5 without a drop since I got it.

I ended up keeping the pages as html but using server side includes.
I researched SSIs a bit and they are working great, processing the php within the html pages and the pr has stayed at 5 throughout, fingers crossed.

I'm doing everything gradually though.

 

[seo_hobbes]

Your page rank has no relationship with the actual rankings of your website. The only benefit it can give you is to place your site on higher positions on various paid/free directories ( which arrange links according to the PR)

Read Page Rank v/s Trust Rank SEO HAWK to get a clear view regarding page rank and whether it has any relationship with the rankings of your website.