PHP vs HTM re search engines

Anon

Hi,

Hopefully someone can supply a definitive answer for me because I\'ve had no luck so far 😉

Are PHP files (.php) treated any differently that HTML files (.htm or .html) by the search engines/crawlers?

ie. If I submit index.php rather than index.htm, am I likely to get penalised in any way, shape or form?

I would assume not as the results of index.php return HTML output any way.

Can anyone clarify this please?

Thanks,
Adam

lexzeus

About Spider/Web Crawler :

From my knowledge .... spider doesn't grab dynamic page .... it only grab static page.

static page :

www.xyz.com/what.html

dynamic page :

www.xyz.com/what.php?what=value
(parameters is transfered with GET method)

www.xyz.com/what.php
(parameters is transfered with POST method : what = value)

Some developer convert the dynamic page to static page so spider can grab it .... see this topic url
!! it shows :

http://www.somewhere.com/Q_11427939.HTM

Actually, that is dynamic pages but Apache transform it into static :

in apache setting (maybe) :

RewriteRule ^/Q_(.*).HTM /question.cgi?q_id=$1

this is the explaination :

if a user connect with

http://www.somewhere.com/Q_11427939.HTM

the apache will transform it into

http://www.somewhere.com/question.cgi?q_id=11427939

So spider will think that Q_11427939.HTM is a static ... but the fact is the 12345 is parameter ...

Another example :

ARTICLE_MAR2000.HTM

it will redirect to :

article.php?season=MAR2000

so the article.php will look for a directory named /ARTICLES/MAR2000 and retrieve a html page and send it back to user ...

Usually, spider look for META TAG to determine what site is that. This is what I get from www.experts-exchange.com

So if you want your page to be caught by spider, make sure it's not dynamic, and put META tag in the
code ...

Some web crawler can crawl dynamic pages. But most web crawler is made not by third party since make it yourself won't take so hard, so there's no standard about web crawler. But crawling dynamic pages is risky, and resources wasting.
Thing to be considered :
1. Dynamic pages support cookies/session whereas ordinary web crawler doesn't, unless the developer make it so.
2. Dynamic pages may use SSL
3. Dynamic pages may require mandatory param=value (GET or POST method)

Ok ?

LexZEUS,
http://lexzeus.tripod.com

keegan

What Alexander said could be misleading...

Search engines don't have any problem with the .php extension, but some won't index pages with query strings (text after the '?' in the URL) and of course pages with POST input can't be indexed either.

-Keegan

lexzeus

Hmm ... that is correct ... even .php can be crawled with customization of the web crawler's developer ... but not all ... even google web crawler can risk to crawl URL contain "?" (GET) ...

But generally, they only crawl HREF="....", and if it finds that "?" appears, it won't be crawled ... so how to prevent "?" in URL, people usually use REWRITE RULE (if they use apache).

And POSTed URL also won't be crawled since it is rare to find POSTed URL in HREF, since they are usually in <FORM ACTION="...">. Even though without POST parameter they sometime work, but it is useless to waste database resource to crawl error-prone pages.

rgds,

Alex