PHP pages and search engines

Anon

Hi,

I'm a newbie to PHP and I've been trying to findout how PHP pages are indexed by search engines. For example if I have 3 HTML pages combined with the following code:

<?php
include("pages/header.htm");
include("pages/contents.htm");
include("pages/footer.htm");
?>

Will this PHP page be indexed by a search engine in the same way a single htm page would be? Thanks in advance for any help.

Regards
Michael Evans

Anon

Yes, because when the search engine access your php-file your server will generate an output with the header, contents and footer as you wanted!
Since it is done serverside there are no problems!!

greg252

The way I understand it is- the page is rendered before it is delivered to a browser, or for that matter a spider or robot. If your header contains proper meta tags, you should index fine.

Anon

Thanks rero and greg! Thats all I wanted to know before I start moving my site to php.

saloon12yrd

For every client (Browser, Spider, Bot, ...) PHP is not existent. All they see is a HTML file. So most searchengines will in fact crawl through your site just fine.

However there are a few things to keep in mind:
- some searchengines do not index pages that end up in .php. Don't ask me why, they just do.
- some (in fact MOST) searchengines do not index pages that look "dynamic". For example if you add a parameter to your page like
index.php?page=homepage
or
index.php?page=news
to display different things you might end up screwed. Searchengines don't like dynamic content and therefore they tend not to index it. A possible workaround (apache only) can be found on www.biochronox.com in the php codes section (licensed GPL).

Also do not forget to add appropriate META tags to your headers. There are many websites out there that describe the problematic much better than I can.

Hope this helped a bit,

Dominique