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PHP - Search Engine Friendly?
Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 9:53 pm
by mattlach
Hi,
I am having a new website built and im wondering what language/development tool to get it built in.
A few developers have suggested i get it done in PHP.
Is PHP good for search engine rankings? As currently our website is #1 for its keywords but it just looks bad and i want to have it re-designed and re-built.
Please post your thoughts here.
Thankyou.
Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 10:12 pm
by nickvd
The language used to write the page (php/asp/java/cfm/ruby) has no direct impact on the search engine ranking. It's how the page itself is designed, layed out, and filled with content that matters...
Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 10:43 pm
by alex.barylski
I have no evidence to substantiate this claim, but neither does anyone to argue the opposite...
PHP should not have any impact on SEO...however I have read journals from so-called SEO experts, many of whom had other practical advice (which makes me take them more seriously) that HTML does indeed rank higher in search engines, than say PHP.
Understandably this is...well...possible...for the same reason search engines historically (although not so much anymore) ranked static URL's higher than dynamic
about.html over
index.php?page=about
the former still (IMHO) typically ranks higher and is likely *prefered* by search engines, just dynamic aren't as discriminated against as they once were...in that, they do get spidered...
So take caution when saying or believing that files extension doesn't make an impact...as I might suggest they do, just not as much as they once did...
Competition is all about winning, and even 0.001% more than your competitors makes you, by virtue of numbers...BETTER!!!

Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2006 2:20 am
by patrikG
Hockey wrote:Understandably this is...well...possible...for the same reason search engines historically (although not so much anymore) ranked static URL's higher than dynamic
about.html over index.php?page=about
[...]
So take caution when saying or believing that files extension doesn't make an impact...as I might suggest they do, just not as much as they once did...
File extensions don't make a difference. You can have search-engine unfriendly URLs in any language, Python, Ruby, Java, ASP, PHP whatever. The choice does not matter in the least. The underlying architecture (not the language) of the application makes the difference.
If you want search-engine friendly URLs, look at blogs. Hard to be more search-engine friendly. A lot of blogs are using software written in PHP.
Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 9:26 am
by fastfingertips
Hm the filename has a lot of importance because there are some criterias called information relevance. One thing is to have an URL that looks like:
http://www.company.com/walkman/Sony/Walkman_12002.html or just Walkman_1200
instead of:
http://www.company.com?prod=1&cat=23
This url friendly system is not a language feature, is a webserver one

.
So no matter what language you will choose try to write good html

Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 10:34 am
by pedrotuga
the damn spiders act like old fixed mind bastards.
unfortunatly a blog of some guy that "red about this subject while taking a <span style='color:blue' title='I'm naughty, are you naughty?'>smurf</span>" gets easier indexed than a serious article about this subject. Its basicaly a mod-rewrite or similar mater. That and a lot of links basicaly to as many pages as possible ( tag clouds, recent posts, more popular, most commented, stupidest posts, etc, etc )
If you have a content based website then go all the way to mod rwrite, if not, just dont bother, that's my sugestion.
i hope someday the spiders will make some effort to distinguish between spam and serious content.
Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 9:09 pm
by alex.barylski
File extensions don't make a difference. You can have search-engine unfriendly URLs in any language, Python, Ruby, Java, ASP, PHP whatever. The choice does not matter in the least. The underlying architecture (not the language) of the application makes the difference.
If you want search-engine friendly URLs, look at blogs. Hard to be more search-engine friendly. A lot of blogs are using software written in PHP.
Meh

Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 9:31 pm
by s.dot