SSI or INC...having or eating SEO cake?

[maniactive]

Is there any way to use an include (like an ssi or inc...or maybe something else?) in a plain old static html (or htm) page, instead of turning it into an asp, shtml, php, or cgi page?

Reason: I have a lot of static html pages that are ranking well at the search engines, and I'd hate to change their actual address and lose their ranking and associated traffic.

But....because we keep coming up with new content, we need more navigational ease. Using a universal include would give us three big benefits: a consistent look & feel, easy to manage nav structure, and a shorter header for maximizing our potential with the search engines.

At this point, I'm thinking: don't touch the pages that are doing well in the engines. Apply SSI or INC or a js nav file to everything else in the future.

Or is there another alternative that we should consider?

[Tenyque]

You can set up SSI's in IIS or Apache to parse through your .htm files without changing any filenames. No reason to put off using those include files.
There is a concern in using this technique will create some unexpected extra overhead on your server, so test.

[redcircle]

Is this a michigan thread?


You can also setup .html files to parse php. Down side to this is will put all the .html's through the parser.

[rlrouse]

I use SSI extensively and all of my pages end in: .html

Try adding this to your .htaccess file:

Options Includes
AddType text/html .htm
AddHandler server-parsed .htm