Hi John,

If the URL's are well indexed and doing well, you "may" not want to change the url. To simply add the ability to run php first you can do it very easily with just what you thought, .htaccess

In fact when I took over as webmaster on my corporate site which was indexed very well I had to do just that.

Add this to your .htaccess file:

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html

It would also make sense if you're home page generates something like

www. A Site.com
www. A Site.com/
www. A Site.com/index.php
www. A Site.com/index.php/

This prevents duplicate page content issues as those pages while the exact same, are different URL's. The canonical tag should point to a single page whichever one is the real url for your site.

Hope that helps,

Don

Thanks for the response.

I can't agree with it however, maybe I should have posted more information as the reason for 2 sites is actually very important. Our manufacturing site focuses and serves as custom manufacturing site, custom jobs, prototyping and support for the clients is the most important aspect of its existence. Watering it down with standard product lines was not an option. This is where the distributor site comes in, the site servers as an option for customers who request standardized items in which we can and do make, but 99% of the time a person requesting the item wouldn't meet our minimum order quantity. Instead of losing the business out right we work with the distributor to stock our products who can buy them in bulk and resell them in smaller quantities.

This will not change. Not because I say so, but the decision is made way above my pay grade.

As for point 1 you said:

If the manufacturing site is sooooo important that you feel compelled to link to it 10,000 times then maybe you should only have one website?

This is a branding thing, the manufacturing site is a custom manufacture and everything there is mostly geared towards providing information about customer manufacturing and supporting our clients.  I am NOT compelled to generate 10,000 links to this site for the manufacturing sites benefit, rather the distributor sites benefit by getting useful information about product materials. Thus, helping the distributor site.

So the question and decission comes down to this;

If we can provide our users on the distributor site more information via a link, without hurting our manufacturing site, as far as user experiences go I'm all for it. But, if this amount of linking could cause us to get dinged then we will not do it.

Once again I do appreciate your input, and I hope I lad out the case for the two different sites, so my original question can be re-examined.

We have a distributor site with a page rank of 3 on its home page, and 0-1'ish on its product pages. While our manufacturing site is PR 4 getting close to 5...

We are thinking about adding a link from our distributors product pages to our manufacturing appropriate material information page. This would be about 10k links spread out among 7 materials. We want to add these links to help our distributor sites customers, but we don't want to hurt our manufacturing site in the process.

I personally don't know of any problem this would cause, but our manufacturing site is so important I need to verify adding this many links wouldn't hurt us.

Your thoughts and knowledge is appreciated.

Excellent answers, you both touched on great points which I have always believed in.

If you have something worth Liking / +1 'ing / Re-tweeting, people will do it for you. Your focus should be to deliver the best possible content, features, products, service and let your customers / readers do the rest. Trying to manipulate the system buy throwing money at it won't be good in the long run.

When I was hired on at my company the site had been built with Absolute Positioned Div Layers... that said there were H1 tags at the bottom of the page.. Dreamweaver isn't very friendly about where it puts these types of layers. The site still did fairly well in the ranking despite this..

That said, I wouldn't personally put a H1 tag in the footer, I would want it as close to the body tag as possible. Though given the way AP Div's work you could have a H1 tag next to the body tag and still be in the footer.

From my experience you're looking at an average of 6 months of a wait time. There are some good articles from Dmoz editors on the web on why they decline sites. From what I've read the value of dmoz.org url's is slowly diminishing. The biggest issue is that it also feeds many other search sites.

Hopefully in the future, Google, Yahoo/Bing, Baidu will all but ignore Dmoz.org and sites feeding off it. There are so many reasons why I think this but I don't want to go off topic on you.

Good Luck

This site has a free generator that crawls your site to generate the map.

http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

HTH