index.php vs index htm ??

habbardone

If my website only has php pages - one being index.php
is it a bit detrimental to web-crawlers and search engines ?

Is it best to have an entry page that is index.html that has all the right meta tags and some good paragraphs with keyword in etc.
and then from there go into the site?

My site is mainly database driven and so might not score well in s.e. listings.

bpat1434

As far as the search engine thing goes, the php or html or shtml or whatever extension you have is not used. The search engines will look at your site perfectly fine. If you're really worried about it, create a robots.txt file, and create a general static HTML file, and point your robots.txt file to that, but disallow all other pages to be viewed.

Robots.txt Tutorial & Help

You could do something like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.php

~Brett

rehfeld

i know some crawlers still dont like dynamic pages that much. but the big search engines handle them pretty good now.

like for example, links like this

index.php?page=foo

would prob be fine for the majority of crawlers

but

index.php?page=foo&bar=baz&s=t&b=c&etc.......

may not go so well in some of the smaller crawlers. but the crawlers that have trouble w/ long query strings, prob arent giving its user the info they want, and as such prob arent used by that many people either.

im no seo expert, but i think as long as your links arent extremely dynamic, and you allow your site to be browsed without cookies enabled, you should be fine.