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Perl / MySQL swap to PHP / MySQL ?

Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 4:47 pm
by thoro
Hi All...

We currently run a site developed in Perl / MySQL. The code has been modified over the last 4 years by various different developers and has become a complete mess. The backend will now be redeveloped, fixing a lot of bugs and adding features.

Searching for developers, it seems there are more PHP developers than Perl. I was therefore wondering if it made sense to swap over to PHP now that we will be starting from scratch.

However, I would like the front end URL's to remain as they are (for search engine / inbound links etc).
Current example URL: http://www.website.com/module.cgi/username

I understand it is possible to hide the .php - but would this affect search engine ranking and/or be a general headache further down the line with future development etc etc?

Sorry for the long winded nature of this post.

Kind regards,
Tom

Re: Perl / MySQL swap to PHP / MySQL ?

Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 4:57 pm
by matthijs
Yes, there are probably more PHP developers nowadays

About the URL's: yes, you can choose any URL structure you want. Certainly on an apache server using rewrite rules you can map any url to any path.

Re: Perl / MySQL swap to PHP / MySQL ?

Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 5:00 pm
by thoro
matthijs wrote: About the URL's: yes, you can choose any URL structure you want. Certainly on an apache server using rewrite rules you can map any url to any path.
Thanks for your reply. Do you know if this impacts seo?

Re: Perl / MySQL swap to PHP / MySQL ?

Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 2:05 am
by matthijs
thoro wrote:Thanks for your reply. Do you know if this impacts seo?
Keeping the URLs the same as you want to do is a good thing.

If, for some reason, you change an URL, you can use redirect rules to notify search engines that the page has been moved to a new location (301 permanent, 302 is temporary).

In general, using some sort of rewrite system to make your URL structure "clean" (/products/jeans/3/) is better then having an "ugly" scheme (/prodid=3?c=76&gtr=9 ).

If you ask if using rewrites itself impacts SEO, the answer is no. Search engines don't care what happens behind the scene, what matters is what each URL is and what content that page has

Re: Perl / MySQL swap to PHP / MySQL ?

Posted: Tue Jun 30, 2009 4:51 am
by thoro
Thanks for your help.

Re: Perl / MySQL swap to PHP / MySQL ?

Posted: Tue Jun 30, 2009 6:25 pm
by SeaJones
Once something is on the net, in terms of SEO, it should never be moved.

A more practical way to approach this is to use 301/302 redirects and the mod_rewrite module on apache to maintain old url structures' usability whilst using the site to implement and new structure.

I.e. If I have website.com/blog/post1 and I decide that I'm starting afresh with a new system, the new system will have different links, say like website.com/posts/1.

The new system will mean that the new links get spidered anyway, but by using a mod rewrite rule or two I can direct the old post addresses to the new locations. This will have little to no effect on SEO.

Code: Select all

 
<ifModule mod_rewrite.c>
 
RewriteEngine On
 
RewriteRule $/blog/post(.*)^ /posts/$1
 
</ifModule>
 
Or something