Does changing .php to .html effects SERP rankings?

Neither should make a difference with that aspect of the page.

More importantly is that your urls themselves would have changed when you made the switch? This will affect your serps because the overall name is different. It may need to re-index those pages as being new.

Generally speaking changing the names of your pages is not a good idea once they are indexed. But now that you changed them, leave them for a bit and your ranking should reappear.

Welcome to the joys of SEO and Google.

well... it seems you have a big misunderstanding of how things go on.

First thing first, Alexa has nothing to do with the language you wrote your site with (asp, php or even basic html). The Alexa gives you a rank based on the visitors that come to your site having Alexa Toolbar installed on their Browser. So, in brief, if you switch back to html your Alexa ranking won't change for that effect... it only changes due to the number of visitors.

I would strongly suggest that you keep the wordpress on your site, as it's much more convenient to work with it than regular HTML. By the way, you can keep the look of your old website and integrate it on your wordpress by the aid of CSS and some HTML. You can also find more wordpress themes here:

Download free WordPress themes - Free WP Themes

Now as for the SEO thing... please you must understand that all pages, no matter what languages were written with, will be translated and sent back to the browser as HTML. The search engines will look at the code of this HTML and therefore the search engines won't penalize you for changing from PHP to ASP for example... why would they do that! It doesn't make any sense.

Lastly.... the G has nothing to do with the content or what is on your page... it reflects *ONLY* the link popularity of your website (the number of links to your site, the quality of those links, etc...). For a more detailed article about PageRank have a look here:

Pagerank Explained. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it.

Please note that Google give a PageRank for each page on your site, and when you rename or have a new page, it won't have any PR at the beginning but will gain a PR in the future if you link to it from other sites, and after it was indexed in Google too.

To perform a check about the pages that are indexed in Google write the following in Google:
site:www.yourwebsite.com

Shall you have any further questions feel free to contact me.

With all my respect,
Wassim

in google's eyes, aPage.html and aPage.php are 2 different pages (or possibly even dup content). You'll need to do a 301 or 302 redirect so it know's the 2 are the same.

I'm in this jam myself I switched my dealerships web site from html to php... I've done a 302 redirect because there's potentially hundreds-of-thousands of dollars in monthly sales on the line if we slip in google - and I hear too many people saying using a 301 redirect caused them to fall hard, and for quite a bit of time

obsidianknight & wassim, thank you for your quick input.

its quite disturbing having a PR and suddenly not having it anymore and then finally not able to gain it once again after waiting for 4-5 months now..

do you know when does the Google rumble jumpe happens?

Also, I saw the advantage of having a wordpress over straight .html.. those plugins are really very powerful and do a lot of job on their own... so in short moving to .html will not effect as long as i keep the page URL same.

and yeah.. ofcourse.. is saw jason's post a little late.. so i am editing mine ..

I have read a lot that 301 redirect is something fishy and can get your site sandboxed..

wordpress can look like anything you want it to.. whether it is professional or not is on the shoulders of the developer who makes the template. It doesn't need to look like a blog at all. I use it all the time for 'normal' sites.