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Is .php indexed (as well)?

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2003 8:23 pm
by Slippy
I was working on a project a short while back and near the end of the project the company hired a marketing team to improve the sites ranking in the search engines.

The company was adament about converting all of the .php to static .html on every page (removing my includes/dynamic navigation etc..) -- so the owner of the company told them to go ahead with it.

Of course they messed up the site something fierce (amateurs). Every page had major problems -- but the site was climbing in the search engines. I argued that the extension shouldn't effect the positioning of the site at all -- but they begged to differ.

So of course, they called me to "Fix" their mistakes and I changed them a nominal fee ;) to perform the task for them. To this day they are still bugging up the site and every 6-8 months I fix all the problems. The funny thing is -- whatever they are doing it seems to be working (the site is top 5 on almost all search engines for their keywords). Sales have increased from 10 orders / day to 100 orders per day in 4 months.

Does anybody <know> whether the file extension effects page rank at all? Same experience?

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Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2003 8:44 pm
by kettle_drum
Dont know. But would it not have just been better to have apache parse .html extensions as php files?

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2003 8:47 pm
by Slippy
Several hundred other sites exist on the same server so parsing all of the html as php would have put a burden on the server.

Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 12:44 am
by phice
I dont think it would.

Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 8:46 pm
by Slippy
I dont think it would.
So you are saying that pushing all of the .html files on a busy web server through php will not increase the overhead on the server. Granted it might not add a lot of overhead but it will add some -- to every single httpd process ... and that can't be good.

Even if there aren't any <?php ?> tags to find, it would still have to look for them.

Hmmm...

Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2003 7:27 am
by twigletmac
Could the search engine ranking be based on other things such as keywords in text and headings etc. I can't believe that .html or .php makes any difference to the decent search engines like google.

Mac

Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2003 11:35 am
by Slippy
Yes it is based on text placements, headings, IMG ALT tags, meta tags and more...

According to this marketing company -- it was absolutely critical that everything got converted to .php instead of .html

But I do agree with you... it shouldn't make a difference... I don't know if they were correct or just ignorant. A good engine should traverse all links, not just the ones with .htm in them.

Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2003 12:32 am
by phice
The only marketing that I will ever deal with is listing my site in google.