I have been doing my site exclusivley in html. What is the big differences bewteen php and html? What are the advantages/disadvantages? What, if any would be the penalty from going from an html site to a php site? Would this hurt the PR I have already gotten as well as the search results? Woud it appear to be a whole new site?
As MitkOK mentioned, PHP is a server-side language, which means the PHP code is executed on the server before sending it to the browser as client-side code. Server-side languages allow you to pull and display data from databases and create custom pages based upon requests from a user.
If you switch from HTML to PHP on an existing site you can redirect each page using a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file. That way, you will not lose any traffic. When the search engines see the 301 status code they should change the URL in their databases to reflect the new URL.
Search engines treat pages with PHP extensions the same as HTML pages. But if you do not redirect the old URLs using a 301 redirect, the new pages will start all over in the search engine rankings. If you change a site to PHP, do not leave the old HTML pages in the site. You may get hit with a duplicate content penalty if you do that.
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