Moving From ASP to PHP without losing SEO?

[Guest]

ASP IS DEAD! Or at least it's in the process of dying.

Because of this, I'm forced to consider moving to some other environment. PHP seems to be the best choice for us. I like the open source concept.

We have a around 3000 products that have already been ranked by the search engines. Other sites have linked to these ASP pages too so I would hate to suddenly cut off those links.

I've submitted a sitemap.xml and kept it fairly well updated. Most of the pages are dynamic pages so one page can sometimes service a large number of products; this has been handled in the sitemap.xml.

I've considered a few strategies but I wanted to get some feedback from people who have gone through this or have some expertise in this.

Where are some good sources of information? Links? Books?

What is the best way to do this?

Thanks for any help.

[NateBaldwin]

Hi - is the primary problem the .asp extension on the pages? Obviously several ways to handle that, and won't claim to know what's "best", but if the PHP pages are going to have the same URL as the old ASP pages aside from the extension, you make make an .htaccess rule that intercepts any visits to pages with the .asp extension and do a permanent redirect to the .php equivalent. That'll give Google and others a heads up that things have moved without running into a 404 error.

At some point, you could remove the redirects, but wouldn't be any big rush - can allow for remote links to old URLs indefinitely if you want.

Another thing to consider - instead of making pages with a .php extension and redirecting to those, why not treat it like a link to a directory instead. If something ends up changing again later, you won't run into the same problem that way. So links like this:

/path/to/product/page.asp

...would become...

/path/to/product/page/

Using mod_rewrite in Apache and a PHP bootstrap file, there's no need to have your page URLs represent the actual locations of pages at all.

Another option might be to edit the Apache config files (or use .htaccess) so it continues to use the .asp extension, but treats them as PHP instead on the server. Might be a quick short-term fix, but wouldn't be my first choice.

[jon8]

from a search engines perspective, every page and it's extension is its own entity.  index.asp has nothing to do with index.php, so changing to php will be like starting over in the search engines.  depending on how well you rank now, it may not be a huge loss, and a great benefit to moving to php, but if you're ranked very well in the search engines now, you may want to think twice, and devise a plan to help combat any possible SE rank loss.

[Guest]

Yes, this is a REALLY tricky thing to do and I've done it the wrong way before. Since I have some time before I actually start work on this, I'm determined to do it right this time.

When using 301 pages, do the SEs discern between going to a real page and going to a error page?

For example, on  my product detail page, most of our products are associated with this page. Something like this: http://www.mysite.com?cid=1394

Considering this, do you have any recommendations and what might a 301 redirect page look like?

I'm guessing that for every product that I have a ...?cid=1394 link to, I need a redirect to a new page?

Is there anything, beyond this and my sitemap.xml that I should be doing?

[NateBaldwin]

If your URLs look like this:

www.mysite.com?cid=1394

...to where no .asp extension is used, then you wouldn't have to change the URL at all for PHP and it wouldn't affect the search engines (they don't know/care what server technology generated the page).

And I wouldn't view a 301 redirect as a 404 - you wouldn't redirect all the old links to a single "301 page", you'd redirect them to the PHP page equivalent for each when the URL is different from what was used in ASP. So if the old page was:

www.example.com/path/to/page.asp

...you'd make a 301 redirect to:

www.example.com/path/to/page.php

...or better:

www.example.com/path/to/page/

...and have the new page show the same basic content as before, but provided by PHP instead of ASP. If that makes sense.

[Guest]

Yes, that makes sense. I need to read about it more. I'm just worried that what I didn't know I needed to know will come back and get me.

Is there anything that might be missing from the standard set of information thats out there on the internet?

What about links to images that might be "ranked?" I suppose a redirect to the new folder where all the same images exist could be used? Video, pdfs...?

[NateBaldwin]

I guess the safest answer is to not move any of those (images, PDFs, etc.) - if possible, structure your PHP system in the same way so all the resources can keep their same URLs. That being said, you can use mod_rewrite in Apache to rewrite any resource paths from the old location to the new location, and use 301 redirects to "re-educate" search engines to the new locations instead of serving them error pages like 404.

Basically, keep things where they are as much as you can, and if you have to move it, give it a 301 redirect or a mod_rewrite so the old URL is an alias to the new. But don't assume I know all the answers either 🙂

[Guest]

Thanks for your help.