Changing from HTML to WordPress... Does it affect ranking?

[sniperhiga]

Website doing well in SERPS and got good pagerank. I want to change regular HTML pages with WordPress and redesign it. So it will switch from /index.html to /index.php. (Hosting / ip / domain the same!)

1. Will it affect search engine rankings?

2. Will it affect pagerank?

3. Should i redirect pages with content which will go into newest WordPress blog?

4. It will slow down traffic a little, but after Google, Yahoo, MSN reindex it it will come back... Is it correct?

5. Will it destroy my year of link building.

P.S. i asked the same question before in Design forum but nobody answered

[NothingButNet]

I'm no expert, but I'll use a bit of logic... so you change the URLs - that's a huge change.

1. Will it affect search engine rankings?
SE rank the URL (index.html) - changing this to index.php will make the index.html unavailable. Soon the SE will eliminate error 404 pages. So yes. It will. Big time.

2. Will it affect pagerank?

yes

3. Should i redirect pages with content which will go into newest WordPress blog?

I think this might be a good idea, instead of deleting them.

4. It will slow down traffic a little, but after Google, Yahoo, MSN reindex it it will come back... Is it correct?

- probably.

5. Will it destroy my year of link building.
yes!

[Comenius]

You could use modrewrite to flip your new .php pages into .html ones. That way it wouldn't look different to the search engines as long as everything else stayed the same.

[sniperhiga]

What about pagerank for homepage? Can it come down to pr0?

Also, does it mean that all my links will be devaluated?

[Comenius]

You can 301 Redirect from old pages to new pages. No negative on your PR or backlinks.

[sniperhiga]

Originally Posted by Comenius

You can 301 Redirect from old pages to new pages. No negative on your PR or backlinks.

So, i can just copy and paste whole code from my new php pages into my .html pages.

For example: freedirectories.php i can copy and paste into freedirectories.html

Correct?

[sniperhiga]

Again... Google crawl new index.php and see that it is not .html anymore. Does it mean that all my 20 000 links from another sites will loose their value? Does it mean that pagerank will go to pr0 and i have to build it again?

[zokiii]

Just use 301 redirection for every page you change and everything will be fine

Seomoz recently changed all URLs , check their rankings to see affects.

[sniperhiga]

So... it mean that i have to redirect index.html - 301 - index.php Right?

[zokiii]

Right.