Php and SEO

Hi

Just wanting a bit of advice and reassurance.
We are in the middle of designing a large business directory in php.
How does Php perform in the search engines, good listings are critical for the site we are developing so are we wasting our time using php?

I've heard you can mod-rewrite your pages, so that your variables comes across as cat_11_111.htm instead of cat.php?sid=11?sid2=111

does anyone have any experience of this and have any advice to offer?

Thanks in advance

 

I was always told that it was adventageous to use a mod rewrite instead of variables, but on my website all the pages I kept at or below 2 (which is all of them) variables seem to get indexed fine.

 

From my experience those subjects are not relevant anymore. Google has improved much there. They say they've improved much and I noticed myself that they do index links with parameters well now. The only situation where they don't is when a parameter is a very long number which looks like a session id.
Anyways, if you even experience such problems you can submit your sitemap to Google through Google Webmaster Tools and Google is going to index those pages properly.
Mod rewrite is mainly to redirect pages, so Google is going to get interested to what you are redirecting anyway.

 

Thanks for the responses and help guys.

Am i right in thinking that a mod rewrite enables you to use words, keywords for example as page names instead of the php parameters

And are the serach engines still able to read the text within the php pages ok?

 

They have no trouble at all spidering, Ranking or indexing pages that are generated with php. The main reason being that the search engines don't see PHP, They see HTML which the PHP files are generating.

 

php is ok with mod_rewrite but sucks bigtime without it.

 

That is completely untrue.

 

Whether of not you want to use a Mod Re-write, I dont think the search engines have problems indexing your pages.

However, I have always found this site useful for creating the mod reqrite code for your.htaccess file.

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mod_rewrite-rewriterule-generator.shtml

Alex

 

Most php scripts i have come accross produce completely irrelevant urls by default untill you modify them. This is just my experience. mod_rewrite comes in and put everything right.

 

You can definitely SEO PHP pages, but it's always better to use static HTML. I would definitely recommend using mod_rewrite for SE-friendly URLs - anything you can do to help will be more points in your favor.

 

DP is evidence that "irrelevant URLs" aren't a bad thing (whatever an irrelevant url is).

 

Yes, but Google is enough?

 

Thanks for the advice and that link to the mod rewrite site. Am i right in thinking that google can read all the html the php script generates then st0x?

can google get in and spider all of the html generated?

 

google will spider it in whatever format you put it up there. i like mod rewrite urls so that urls are more friendly to viewers.

 

Mod rewrite is good for enabling user friendly and keyword rich urls. Otherwise, they say to keep arguments in the url down to no more than 2 or 3. Also, very important - always keep the arguments in the same order, or else you'll run into duplicate content issues (multiple urls for the same content).

 

That's right. PHP is just a way to generate HTML on the server before sending it out. It doesn't matter if you use AsP, PHP or perl. As long as it generates html a bot can crawl, index and spider it.

 

did you check http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=23044?

 

php doesn't affect SEO at all....The php code is parsed on the server and is never seen by the bots

 

PHP and ASP are just back-ended scripts. they don't send php/asp code to he browser/google , they send html data.