HTML versus ASP pages

[Rockwebmaster]

A couple of months ago I converted my website from Microsoft Frontpage to Dream Weaver. In the process I went from HTML static pages to ASP pages. I've also noticed that my ranking using Dream Weaver as my development program has caused my site to drop considerably. Can anyone tell me if there is something I need to include in the Meta Tags when switching programs? Thanks

[flood6]

It is unlikely that any loss in SE positioning has anything to do with conversion from static html to asp. I'll qualify this by saying that URL's with several sets of vars (I'm guessing more than 3) will have some difficulty being indexed, especially by the "second tier" SE's. Also if the spiders are getting session id’s this can have a negative effect, too.

Post your URL and the keyword phrase where you have seen such a drop to see if we can help explain why you are having difficulty.

Does your home page have any PR? Do any of your interior pages? Check google to see how many of your new pages have been indexed. It may just be a matter of google needing time to index and place your whole site. Or your PR may not have spread to all the new pages resulting in a little less juice. I just redid my site a few weeks ago and while a few pages have been indexed, most haven't, and I have no PR anywhere except on my homepage.

You can also post your site in the review forum to get more tips there.

Anyway post your URL's and I imagine someone will be able to point you in the right direction.

Good luck.

[csoft]

The search engine doesn't know the difference unless they put code to analyze the file extension (which I doubt)..One thing you may want to check is if you have dynamic content parameters being used in your scripts..If you see a '?' question mark in the URL of your website, that is a red flag for some search engines and they wont index it..

[paulhiles]

I always thought that if I changed the name of an existing page, or added a new page with a new filename, then that page would automatically be a PR0, because it hadn't been indexed by Google.

Likewise, if I had a page called london-web-design.html and changed it to london-web-design.asp I would expect Google to look at it as a new page. Any links pointing to this page would likewise be regarded as new links to a new page. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this one!

Paul

[ronniethedodger]

That is true Paul. The changing of the file extensions in the SE's eyes will be treated as different pages. For example, index.html is not the same as index.htm (or .asp, or .shtml, etc.). They will be treated as new pages.

Any external links pointing to the old extensions will not be found. Unless the links made reference only to the root of the domain and no mention of filenames were made...then there will be no problem.

With that all said ... this is not the case here. If the site in question is http://www.walleyeweb.com which is in Rockwebmaster's Location information, then his changes were not made just a couple of months ago as he stated. In fact he made those changes sometime between June 9th and June 18th of last year according to the Internet Archive.

A review of backlinks going to the site reveals that they are practically non-existant. The site only has 20 at most in total that I can find, albeit three of those are from the Google, Yahoo, and DMOZ directories.

The file extension is not the problem here IMO, for the pages are getting indexed. The server seems to be a slug though...and this appears to be causing some pages to show up in the Google index with no descriptions.

I would work on getting more inbound links, and look into the "speed" optimization of your site to deliver the pages more quickly (I have a DSL line and it is quite slow).