Making Massive HTML Site Manageable

4 replies
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 Jeff Henshaw
    Wow, that's not an easy post to answer. Have you thought of posting this on one of the more technical areas of the forum, such as the website design section?
    Website Design

    Just my thoughts and good luck,

    Jeff.
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  • Profile picture of the author SoftwareSupport
    Oops, I didn't realize internet marketing was a sub-forum!! Could a mod please move this to the website-design forum and delete this reply? Thanks.

    ***Edit*** I didn't want to wait so I reposted.. Mods feel free to delete this entire topic. Thanks.
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  • Profile picture of the author DogScout
    AddType text/html
    AddHandler server-parsed .html

    To ,htaccess file 'should make html pages parse, (Unless you are changing to a .php module). (Also, some servers need a 'AddAplication' script instead of the 'AddHandler'. Search 'parse html pages' and you will find several ways to do it.)
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  • Profile picture of the author dearfriendvn
    Originally Posted by SoftwareSupport View Post


    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?
    It can be done both in PHP or .net. The technique employed is called url rewritting. I don't know much about PHP, but if using .net MVC in the right way, the html is closed to the original (if not 100%).

    Obviously you want to change to dynamic solution for some reasons. So simply changing some configuration to make request for index.html to be served by index.php will not be enough. Also, Google might be very sensitive with your changes. My 2 cents is you should find a professional for the task, and make sure he understands the important of keeping current urls.
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