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Will changing file extension affect SE rankings?

One of my client owns a large website (over 4000pages) developed in html needs to be redesigned but he dont want us to use opensource or php because he thinks that can drop search engine ranking. Working over 4000 pages without using php has increased lot of work. How to avoid it without loosing search engine rank.

Site hold #1 rank on google.

Community
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user1970254
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  • Why would you affect SEO by using PHP? Use URL Rewrites to get pretty URL's. Google doesn't really care what language a site is written in. If you're worried that URL's may change from .html / .htm to .php then you can just save your PHP files as .html/.htm or again, URL rewrite. – ajtrichards Jan 19 '13 at 20:45

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You can still use a .html extension and use PHP. The search engines don't know, or care about, what server side language you use so you can use PHP without affecting SEO at all.

John Conde
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    You actually _should_ still use .html as an extension regardless. http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html. There's no reason that an implementation detail like PHP should creep into the URL. – Matt Whipple Jan 19 '13 at 20:49
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... but he dont want us to use opensource or php because he thinks that can drop search engine ranking.

Is he concerned about file extensions like .php, .jsp, or .aspx? File extension is a part of the page URL and will not affect page rank at all. However, if you have existing page URL with one extension (e.g. .html) and you change it to different extension, say, .php then the page URL changes and that will affect Google ranking.

But Google are aware of that kind of changes and they recommend using 301 redirects (link) from old URLs to the new ones (example, in your case /foo.html to /foo.php)

Tom
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