[RESOLVED] change .html to .php and google rankings

[rikmoncur]

I'm hosted on commercial webspace.

My site is top ranked in Google - it's taken a long time and a lot of tweaking to get there and it's a valuable asset.

The problem is, the site is all .html files and I want to change them to .php without endangering my ranking.

Has anyone experience of this?

The home page is obviously the most important. Google may see it as 'example.com' without caring if it's 'example.com/index.html' or 'example.com/index.php' but I'm not sure.

Obviously, if a page is ranked on google as 'example.html' and I change it to 'example.php' then it'll be a dud link from google.
I saw somewhere that .htaccess might have some way to solve this but I can't find the reference.

[madwormer2]

Yeh, you want Apache mod_rewrite

I don't have much experience with it, but you could do something like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*).html $1.php

[rikmoncur]

thanx for the Apache mod_rewrite hint.
It worked for me on another server but the site I'm working on runs on a Zeus server and although they have some mod_rewrite support, they want to charge a whole lot extra for it - time to take my business elsewhere!