[RESOLVED] PHP sites and SEO

[Lateuk]

Hello all,
First post so please be nice :-)

I have created many site and got high rankings in search engines using just HTML pages.

Question 1> I am about to use PHP for a new site, and was wondering if this will affect my rankings, i take it that search engines will spider my site as normal, because none of the php is visable. Is this correct?

Question 2> Does it matter if i call my first page index.htm or index.php and what are the guide lines for it being either a .php page or a .htm page (even though most of my pages will contain both?)

Thanks

Late

[bogu]

Crawler is not interested in your file extension, he see the output (html code) and know how to parse it ...

Page rank has nothing to do with seo, page rank has to do with the rank of other page's that link`s to your page ...

[Lateuk]

So it makes no difference to anyone who visits or search engines whether i use .php or .htm or .html suffix?

And my site will get spidered correctly if i use php to pull together the header, footer, and the main pages?

Late

[NogDog]

All spiders do is follow links. They don't care if the links are to .html or .php pages, as long as those links result in the appropriate HTTP success codes followed by valid [X]HTML (or other formats which that spider might recognize, such as PDF) content for it to parse and analyze. It's the same as any browser opening up a page on your site: it doesn't care what file extensions are used, just that it gets usable content returned to it to display.

One word of caution, though: Google for sure (and probably other search engines) generally ignores links (PHP or not) that have an "?id=somevalue" query string in the URL (the "id" variable name being key), as it assumes such pages are customized output for different users/circumstances.

[MarkR]

Search engines can see PHP regardless of the filename, and most search engines do not ignore URLs containing a ?

Some search engine spiders are mindful of session IDs in query strings and will treat URLs containing different session IDs as equivalent. However, I still recommend you do not use these.

You should ensure that:
- Each page has EXACTLY ONE URL. This means that you don't link to several versions of the same page, by different query string parameters or capitalisation etc.
- Pages which do not need to be indexed are listed in your robots.txt file somehow (e.g. logon page, review entry form, etc)

Then it will be fine.

Mark

[Lateuk]

So if i needed a site with a common header, footer, menu on left. If only the main section of the page changes depending on which link is clicked on the left hand menu, then surely when it gets added to the search engines there will be links to the different content pages, and when they are clicked on there will be no menu, footer or header as they are a html page in their own right.

I want these separate on the search engines, but i do want the footers, headers, and menu on the left.

This is getting a little confusing, hope that makes sense.

Late

[NogDog]

Just think of it this way: the search engine sees things exactly as your browser does: it has no idea that the page it linked to has PHP code running on the server, including data from other files. All it sees is the end result: the HTML page that gets output to the client (such as your web browser). To rephrase: it is not reading your source code files on the server, it is reading the output that the web server sends after all your PHP code has been processed from the page that was linked to.

[Lateuk]

That finally makes sense. Many Thanks.

[bogu]

Now u can mark your thread as RESOLVED.