Mod rewrite and page rank ect

[robind]

I have a quick question about mod rewrite

I have well established php site with history and inbound deep links with low to medium complexity dynamic urls which are comprehensively and fully indexed by google.

I keep reading about the benefits of static urls. Is it worth implementing a mod rewrite rule to create static and user friendly urls if my current links are already comprehensively indexed?

Presuming I go ahead with this, I understand page rank would dissapear but not necessarily the rankings. Can anybody back this up? Is there a possibility of losing link equity on existing inbound links. I know you can redirect these, but it sounds potentially problematic to me.

thanks in advance

 

[ScottJ]

If you were designing a site from scratch then yes perhaps choose mod-rewrite and keyword specific named pages, but if it were me and it wasn't broken I wouldn't go trying to change it.

If your page are all indexed and rank well then there is no problem.
If you were to chage page names yes you would need to 301 all url's to the new one's

 

[itrends]

As long as you 301 the old links to the new links they your rankings / page rank etc would not be lost. It may take an update or two (of the page rank toolbar data rather than the 'real' data) to show the changes, but I have done this many times in recent years, as recently as 3 weeks ago, and no rankings have been lost, often they slightly improve as it freshens things up and makes the links more 'relevant' feeling.

But, if you get it wrong / don't redirect with 301 header codes then you are looking at some serious issues.

In your particular case, I would agree that saving this change for when you see things starting to sink would be wiser than messing with what works. If it aint broke....

As an aside, clean links can help users slightly with reference, sending in emails, linking back to you, bookmarks etc, but not enough to make that the reason to do it

 

[storebuilder]

Years ago if you had php files with say page.php?& then it was true that google would not deep crawl your site for fear of entering a never ending loop of crawl.

At that time .html did indeed rank higher.

I still believe .html is the best but if you have good rankings then you have everything to lose and very little to gain by changing.

Crawl is now much more sophisticated

Stick.