It looks like I’m going to have change a .html file over to a .php file as I cannot parse PHP within the .html file. (I’m using IIS to handle PHP so I can’t configure to parse PHP within html either)
Anyway, what I’m interested to know is if I change my .html over to .php page, how much will this impact my google rankings? Will it be like starting from scratch for that particular page and is there anything I can do about this?
Yes. You need to use a “301 redirect” to maintain the rank for that page.
Watch the video here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=93633