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Making Massive HTML Site Manageable

by SoftwareSupport
9 replies
  • WEB DESIGN
    • |
My company has a website with roughly 1000 html pages on it. When searching for our best keywords one of our pages will usually rank in the top 5 in a search engine. We also have thousands of backlinks to our html pages.

This is not a server side website and minimal CSS is applied to the site. All of this makes it very hard to manage changes to the site. I was trying to figure out the best way to make this large site manageable without ruining our rankings.

Is it possible to have Apache handle HTML page requests using a mod_rewrite so if a user hit the page www[dot]mysite[dot]com/index.html Apache would actually run index.php and return the file as index.html? Would this stop us from losing positioning in search engines during the change to server side?

Are there any other suggestions? Thanks for any help.
#html #making #manageable #massive #site
  • Profile picture of the author Jason Z
    I did something similar to what you are talking about with redirects. I recently turned an old html website into a shiny new WordPress site and I did 301 Redirects that send pages like /about-us.html to /about so that if people went to the old pages it would just send them to the new page without causing any 404 errors and losing rank.
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    Jason Zimmerman is an offline marketing and consulting professional. He has been developing web sites and digital marketing plans for local businesses since 2000.
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  • Profile picture of the author SoftwareSupport
    There's no rank loss when it redirects every time the page is hit? I don't know enough about the subject but I feel like Google would look down on being redirected from a page.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jason Z
    For that particular site it ranked #1 for a certain keyword before the change and still ranked the same after we rolled out the new site. I don't know if that's the norm, but we didn't see a drop in the serps.
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    Jason Zimmerman is an offline marketing and consulting professional. He has been developing web sites and digital marketing plans for local businesses since 2000.
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  • Profile picture of the author OBaz
    If you are going to migrate your HTML site to Wordpress site, you can use WP plugin, something alongside of - Simple 301 Redirects, so you do not lose your pagerank.

    WordPress › Simple 301 Redirects « WordPress Plugins
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    • Profile picture of the author SoftwareSupport
      Originally Posted by OBaz View Post

      If you are going to migrate your HTML site to Wordpress site, you can use WP plugin, something alongside of - Simple 301 Redirects, so you do not lose your pagerank.

      wordpress [dot] org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/]WordPress › Simple 301 Redirects « WordPress Plugins
      I have not used Wordpress but it sounds like it might be the way to go for many reasons. I'll read up on this, thanks.


      Originally Posted by nikeman070 View Post

      I had this problem the other day, I have a web design site that I kept building pages, and in the footer I realized I would have to go to every page and change them manually, so I can update our blog posts, I figured I could use .PHP (now I know you said you don't have sever side function but you could look into getting phpmyadmin with your hosting)

      as a matter of fact I don't recall using php myadmin, You can just set it up as a php include. You can update all the files with one single file, of course you would have to copy a bit of code into each page.

      I am sure there is a way you can auto update bits of code automatically with some type of tool I am not sure. I did learn today that dreamweaver can take out a specific word or phrase throughout the whole document with a few clicks.
      Getting PHP is not the issue and I could set up the pages for includes and such. My problem is that the page URL would change and we have tons of backlinks as well as good placements with our current URLs.

      If you're interested in the programs you've brought up I'd suggest taking a look at Windows Grep and some sort of macro software like WinAutomation.

      Originally Posted by xtrapunch View Post

      Let your current hosting be where it is. Build your new website using a CMS elsewhere on a separate domain or sub-domain. Put everything in exactly the same way as your original website. Once you are sure everything is in order, transfer the content/CMS to your main domain. Since you had been working on a different domain, you will have to do a quick "Find-Replace" in database. No 301 redirects needed if you retain the same URL structure.
      I'm not positive what you're saying here, are the URLs of my pages still changing from .html to .php? If they are then that's what I'm trying to avoid but if they aren't then I might be missing how that works.

      Thanks for the replies everyone.
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  • Profile picture of the author nikeman070
    I don't know if this is irrelevant but all ideas thrown at you could possibly help..

    I had this problem the other day, I have a web design site that I kept building pages, and in the footer I realized I would have to go to every page and change them manually, so I can update our blog posts, I figured I could use .PHP (now I know you said you don't have sever side function but you could look into getting phpmyadmin with your hosting)

    as a matter of fact I don't recall using php myadmin, You can just set it up as a php include. You can update all the files with one single file, of course you would have to copy a bit of code into each page.

    I am sure there is a way you can auto update bits of code automatically with some type of tool I am not sure. I did learn today that dreamweaver can take out a specific word or phrase throughout the whole document with a few clicks.
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  • Profile picture of the author xtrapunch
    Let your current hosting be where it is. Build your new website using a CMS elsewhere on a separate domain or sub-domain. Put everything in exactly the same way as your original website. Once you are sure everything is in order, transfer the content/CMS to your main domain. Since you had been working on a different domain, you will have to do a quick "Find-Replace" in database. No 301 redirects needed if you retain the same URL structure.
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    >> Web Design, Wordpress & SEO - XtraPunch.com <<
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  • Profile picture of the author EricDelano
    That's cool Jason! I like that approach, alot of hard, but well earned.
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  • Profile picture of the author mechelleweb
    Well 301 redirection is better way. Redirect your old website to new CMS based shiny website without loss of ranking. You will have no harm in your keyword ranking and you also can manage huge website easily.
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