Google and Site Redesign

I'm in the process of redesigning my site from static HTML to HTML with CSS (for layout) and PHP (for co-op and headers/footers).
I am going to keep the current content and file names identical, but the extension will change from .html to.php.

Will the Big G consider this overhaul a new site and "sandbox" the whole thing, or view it as an upgraded site, with only a small change in its SERPS?

Thanks for your insight.

 

From my experience, if a site is redesigned it does not get thrown back into the sandbox. It does however need to completely respider the site and the ranks will be all over the place for a while.
KG

 

You don't need to lose the .html links. You could rewrite the URLs with mod_rewrite, using a .htaccess file (on Apache only).

Paste this into a .htaccess file in your top level web directory (usually /var/www/html):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.+)\.html $1\.php?%{QUERY_STRING}

Code (markup):

The above code is untested, but should work. This will rewrite all *.html files to *.php. A dozen other methods exist to do this, but this would work well enough.

 

depending on your set up there is no need to rename any of the files from htm to php or alike.

There are plenty of thread here about how to get htm to be interpreted by php
the easiest if you have nix/apache is

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .htm
or for both ssi and htm
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .htm .shtml

either define it in cpanel or alike or just plonk it into .htaccess
Expat

 

In my experience, google doesn't care how your site is laid out so long as the information and page names do not change. I have changed my personal web design site several times and usually it does not matter. Last time I changed a bunch of page names and just used mod_rewrite and 302 redirects to remedy any issues that arose, I just keep an eye on my error logs and fix pages as needed, seems to work okay as since that I have gone to #1 for several key terms.

 

Don't need to use .php to display coop ads, you can display them on .html pages, server just needs to be able to do the php thing. For more detail, ask in the coop forum.

 

On topic, I have a question.

if you are given a choice of using either one of extension what is more preffered html or php ? Any seo advantage on using the choice ?

Regards,
Tuning