PHP and Search Engines

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Beady
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PHP and Search Engines

Post by Beady »

Hi,

I've just lost a long standing customer because he has been told by someone that a web site done in PHP/mySQL will not be found by the search engines. The content is held in a database and therefore will not be 'seen' by the crawlers/webbots etc.

They have now offered to re-do his site in HTML, which they claim will then help to improve his standings in the search engines.

Does anyone have any comments? Can anyone substantiate this claim, or give me a lead on how to disprove it?

I know what I feel about this claim.

Regards,

Bernard D
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JayBird
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Post by JayBird »

That is pretty much a load of rubiish mate!

Search engines can see whatever the user sees!

Dynamic sites can affect serach engine rankings if you have URLS like:

http://www.domain.com/index.php?pageid=2

http://www.domain.com/index.php?pageid=2&subcat=1

It is usually better to avoid this convention and use mod-rewrite.

But as for the claims of the search engine not "seeing" the content becuase it is in a database, that it nonsense. The code is processed server side, the served to the user/search engine


Mark
Beady
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Post by Beady »

Cheers, and thanks for the quick reply.

That is pretty much what I thought. Server side pre-processing occurs on every page, HTML/PHP/ASP or whatever and the searching bot sees what it is given, not what has gone before.

Didn't know about mod-rewrite though, can you point mke to somewhere I can find out about it.

Regards,

Bernard D
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s.dot
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Post by s.dot »

The database is simply a way to store and retrieve data. As pimptastic said, content is still content. A static HTML page wouldn't be seen any differently than a page that was pulled out of a database. In either case, the server still has to process the request(s) and the end result will be content on the website. Doesn't make a difference to the search engines.

The only thing I can think of is what pimptastic mentioned. The URLs might be treated differently if they are in that form. However, I believe that's not a factor anymore with the major search engines.
Set Search Time - A google chrome extension. When you search only results from the past year (or set time period) are displayed. Helps tremendously when using new technologies to avoid outdated results.
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JayBird
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volka
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Post by volka »

a simple example: 7th hit, and the forum certainly isn't optimized for that search ;)
http://www.google.de/search?&q=service%20locator%20php
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matthijs
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Post by matthijs »

I would definately explain to your (ex)customer that he or she is tricked/cheated on by the other company. If not for regaining the customer, then at least to protect him/her from more swindle.

Or, if it's not a swindle, that other company has absolutely no clue about webdesign and your (ex)customer is still dealing with the wrong party.
Beady
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Post by Beady »

Many thanks for the replies. It's pretty much as I understood it. I'll speak to my (ex) customer and at least let him know what is what so he can keep an eye on them.

Cheers,

Bernard D
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