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PHP and Search Engines

Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2004 3:57 am
by Dipsy
Hello,
Sorry I'm a non-techie marketing person, who's just employed a full-time web developer/graphic design person: main priority to update/complete our start-up company PHP website.
This person has advised that PHP is not a good package - there are problems with Search Engines - spiders - checking through pages to identify key headings/text and thus Search Engines will not promote/list PHP websites. He recommend we switch back to static html pages, which he'll update.
Can anyone help here? either supporting or refuting his advice? I loved working with PHP and being able to update pages, but as a company we need to be found by Search Engines.
Many thanks, Carol :cry:

Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2004 4:02 am
by patrikG
That's not true. Most search-engines (and Google for sure) check php-pages or, indeed, any dynamically created page. "Switching back to static HTML" is silly, as you can have the best of both worlds if you have the business logic of your website administered by PHP which then writes HTML pages.

correct

Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2004 5:05 am
by phpScott
I totally agree with PatrickG

Have the php write the static HTML pages is probably the best but google and a few others will follow php pages but as long as they don't take to long to generate or as I have found the spiders don't follow pages to well that have URLS like http://www.mysite.com\siteNews.php?page=1234&userId=2389&someVar=bob

as the information after the ? is too variable and can through of the spiders, etc...

I worked on a site that used both methods and quickly found that having php write the static HTML was the best but using .php as an extension only had a small hit for page ranking. The pages that had the ? in the url where badly hurt.

If the pages aren't going to be update on a regular basis having php write the pages as HTML would probably be the best but frequently updated pages will probably have to be php as the server hit can be high if it has to keep creating and updating pages.

phpScott

Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2004 6:33 am
by McGruff
Apparently Google does not cope perfectly with query strings but that's not a problem specific to php and you can get around it easily with mod_rewrite or force-type tricks. If you control your own server, all traces of php can be hidden.

If your site has a lot of regularly changing data updating by hand is good as a job-creation scheme but bad as an efficient way to work.

Posted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 11:47 am
by Saethyr
Gotta agree with McGruff on this one, mod_rewrite for apache is the way to go. I do programming and SEO and when we switched to mod_rewrite google, yahoo, and MSN all tripled in the amount of pages they would spider.