Hey all!

I just took on a new client that has a TON of pages, and they want all of them cleaned up, new look, better rankings etc. I'm seeing a LOT of work ahead of me - all the pages are static html, and they use xCart for their ecommerce.

My question is - I've heard of using xmlhttp to access items in the db, but is this a search engine friendly way of setting up their product catalog pages? I can use their html pages that they already have indexed, and start pulling the product list from a db I set up - right?

Also, I wanted to make some other things dynamic to save me time in the future. Could I do this for example?

This would be a page they already have (sample.html)
html
head & meta
use php to include the top layout stored in another file/db etc
xmlhttp/html to include the products
use php to include the bottom layout
close up html

I could then use the db and php layout files to change the guts or look of the pages dynamically.

My main concern is keeping their ranking the same, or making it better obviously - and having search engine friendly pages.

Does this make sense? Will this work?

Thanks!!!

Change all the html pages to PHP, but make your server tell the outside world the extention is html. In other words, make it look to the search agents that nothing has changed.

Through htaccess?

Would the pages still be indexed correctly using the include method with PHP for redundant things (nav links, header, layout etc)?

Thanks!

Google, MSN, and FireFox won't know how you generated the pages. They'll know the name (URL), the markup, and the content. They won't even know it's dynamic unless they request it again and again to compare the differences. And even then, you could have made the change in TextPad for all they know.