PHP vs ASP (Biased SEO issue)

Tea_J

Hi,

I've been doing further research regarding Search Engine Optimization.. The 2 technologies I'm trying to make efficient for SE is PHP and Flash..

In PHP, i was checking on some indexing probabilities of plain PHP with get vairables not mod_rewritten (not coverting ? to /) ..

I was stunned to see the fact sheet of google (http://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html) claim to support crawling file types including ASP but NO MENTION OF PHP!!!

I put this furtner into testing it in real situations.. after doing 100 google searches using search queries that would most likely make use of dynamic pages such as "product catalogues", i found out that MOST of the time (say about 90% or even more), pages that were indexed were ASP pages!!!

Again, I was hunting for search results involving plain dynamic pages without url cloacking and such techniques. just plain

file.ext?product=1&cat=20 etc etc...
(using the dreaded question mark)

Not this little research of mine is not enough to make conclusions, but surely the results are quite alarming..

I would love to hear your views on this.

Tea

planetsim

I think theres no mention of PHP because this document hasnt been updated. From what ive seen yes they do index php files whether there using mod_rewrite or not.

fire_cracker

I used to run a website, totaly done with dynamic PHP, and I noticed that our search engine rankings went up after I changed the variables to mod_rewrite. It was not reading anything in my links that contained a question mark. We were at a google pr 2 and only our front page would ever show up in the se's, and after converting the variables, and chaning very little else with our content, suddenly we jumped to a pr 4, and I could find other documents in the search listing aside from just our front page.

That leads me to believe that google is PHP unfriendly in a normal situation. Conver the vars and you'll be just fine however 🙂

Just my 2 cents

MarkR

Modern search engines do index pages containing query strings.

They just don't go "infinitely deep" into such sites.

I think Google typically goes a couple of levels deep then stops. This is a good idea because many dynamic sites contain a lot of pages with different URLs but similar or identical content - there is no way a search engine can determine this.

Some dynamic sites contain an almost infinite number of distinct URLs even though they have a small number pages.

I have not had problems getting PHP-generated sites indexed by Google, these days I don't really care about any others (are there any others? MsnBot perhaps now)

In any case it's not any different for ASP sites.

Mark

Tea_J

Thanks for the kind replies.

Modern search engines do index pages containing query strings.

They just don't go "infinitely deep" into such sites.

I think Google typically goes a couple of levels deep then stops. This is a good idea because many dynamic sites contain a lot of pages with different URLs but similar or identical content - there is no way a search engine can determine this.

Some dynamic sites contain an almost infinite number of distinct URLs even though they have a small number pages.

You must be talking about "unlinked" php pages perhaps???

But in contrast to that, I undersand that when it is "HARDLINKED", no matter what it is, it will be successfully crawled? Am I correct?

When i say hard linked i mean that the link to the dynamic pages are typed in the document

eg. "prod.php?a=1&b=2&"

I ask because I can't see any confusion and endless loops in crawling dynamic pages if googlebot followed the links like normal html pages (.html) with the exception of some extra [b defined[/b] characters (.php?var=val) ...

Dont you see? hmm...

I used to run a website, totaly done with dynamic PHP, and I noticed that our search engine rankings went up after I changed the variables to mod_rewrite. It was not reading anything in my links that contained a question mark.

about mod_rewrite, I am working into that already. simple but effected method.. is there a significant additional overhead to this?

The reason i thought asp was getting more respect over php was because, 1st, it's not mentioned.. second, if there were search engine results that had query strings, my tests showed that asp gets more results of this kind than php.. 8 out of 10 times!

tea

Tea_J

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